Murder Below Montparnasse

Tuesday Early Morning, Silicon Valley


DAWN BLUSHED ROSE-ORANGE over the mountains fringing the bay and over the Buick logo still visible under the Tradelert sign. Five A.M. René, goosebumps running up his arms, had logged into Susie’s terminal using his sysadmin access. Nervous, he scanned yesterday’s protocols. He was drinking instant General Foods International café mocha cappuccino. Even though he’d doubled the packets, it still tasted like brown piss.

With that bad taste in his mouth, he dug deeper into the admin program to find who held the tokens for remote access. Susie had added him last night at 11:45 P.M.

He took one more sip. Clenched his teeth and started with her drawers. Manuals, zip drives. Finally he found the envelope marked René with his token.

He inserted the token, verified his log-in—she’d written in red marker with a heart—and accessed the whole program.

He’d entered Ali Baba’s cave. The workings, up-to-the-minute reports and scans—everything. With mounting anxiety he wondered why this access hadn’t been provided to him yesterday. It would have streamlined his work, saved him a lot of time. Had Susie forgotten or deliberately left him out? But those overheard words came back to him—the dwarf’s got no idea.

There had to be more tokens. After some searching in her drawer, he found one. Now he’d clone it and.…

“Early, eh? Didn’t see you.” A tall figure shadowed the breaking dawn. “Signed in yet?”

René smiled up at the blue-uniformed rent-a-guard. “They haven’t even printed my business card. I’m René Friant, chief technology officer.”

“Don’t see your name here, sir.”

He had to buy time. “You’re sure?”

René reached down to tie his shoe.

“Sorry, sir.” The guard came closer. “We’re obliged to check.”

“Then check the bronze CTO office plate with my name, René Friant.”

After scanning the empty offices and corridors, René finally found two programmers at workstations. Doughnut crumbs trailed from the youngest one’s sparse goatee. “Like one, my man?” he asked René, offering him a cardboard box assortment.

René hesitated, eyeing the icing-laden circles of fried dough. “Thought that was flic … I mean, police food.”

“Cop food—good one, my man. Nice you appreciate fine distinctions in American cuisine,” he grinned. “I’m Brad. Night shift.” He yawned and glanced at the time. “I’m outta here in ten minutes.” Brad swiveled his chair back to the terminal screen and clicked a few keys. “I love French movies. Those shots of the Eiffel Tower and girls in berets. Accordian music.”

“Mais oui, Parisian girls, striped shirts, berets and baguettes.” We live to be stereotypes, he almost said. Then he thought again. “Brad, before you go, mind doing me a small favor?”

BEFORE THE INVESTOR meeting, René found Andy at his laptop in the bright fluorescent-lit boardroom of the converted Buick leasing office.

“All systems go, dude. Brilliant work.”

Andy’s smile blazed. Charisma, wasn’t that what they called it? He lit up a room, made you feel like the most important person in the universe. Megawatts of charm in a two-piece suit over a Hawaiian shirt and sandals.

“Afraid there’s an issue you need to know about, Andy,” René said. He gathered his courage. Tried to figure out the right words.

Andy’s brow rose. “Issue? I checked the system minutes ago, it’s all good.” He shook his sun-bleached surfer curls. “Nerves? That’s it, isn’t it? Your first presentation as CTO. Dude, I get it.”

René hated disappointing him.

“My baby … our baby’s hatching into the world,” Andy said. “Be proud, René.”

He needed to know before the investors arrived.

“Not proud of this.” René hit keys on Andy’s laptop, opening the program. A few more strokes and René pointed to algorithms popping up on the screen. “This back door allows pre-trading advantage. Like front running. Illegal, Andy. It violates every stock exchange standard.”

Andy shrugged. “It’s business, René.”

Shocked, René stumbled against the boardroom table. He didn’t understand. Didn’t want to understand.

“You knew, Andy?”

“Forget about it, René. I’ve got the term sheet.”

“Term sheet?”

“Everyone in the company wants this term sheet,” Andy said. “It’s our offer from three venture capitalists to invest thirty million. We’ll go public within two months and be worth two hundred million.” Andy squeezed René’s arm. Smiled. “Your two-dollar stock will go to eighty dollars, then twenty million.”

“Twenty million dollars?”

Andy winked. “And a lot more in francs. It’s all worth it to us if you can patch and tweak before we launch the product for stock trading. And to keep you here. Okay, dude? We’re good?”

Astounded, René felt his eyes widen. Serious, Andy was serious.

“But you can’t think this won’t be discovered,” René said. “Anyone in securities will recognize this scam.”

Andy gave a big laugh. He slapped René on the back. René felt his world caving in.

“Don’t worry, we’re talking about a stock trading advantage of a second or two to three seconds. Harder than bullets to prove. The work’s brilliant. Beautiful, dude,” Andy said. “Hell, you did it yourself.”

Andy pulled out his cell phone.

“So we’re good, right, René?”

“I’m not an employee,” René said, shaking. “I came in on a tourist visa. This has got nothing to do with me.”

“Did you forget the fax you signed and accepted for the CTO position, René?”

One step ahead of him. The whole time. A bitter taste filled his mouth and it didn’t come from faux cappuccino. Their rush employment offer, the private jet, the stock options lured him here, trapped him. Idiot.

Andy had used him. A scapegoat to take the fall if he squealed. René doubted Andy needed him anymore except to keep his mouth shut.

René’s phone trilled in his pocket. He answered automatically.

“Ça va, René?” Aimée’s voice an echoey reverberation as the call pinged over the ocean. “Made your millions yet?”

Little did she know. “I like my millions clean,” René said in English.

Andy folded his arms, planting himself in front of the door.

“Not dirty, Aimée,” he added, looking Andy in the eye.

But he’d lost the connection.





Tuesday Afternoon, Paris


I like my millions? Aimée kicked the matted lime-tree blossoms littering Boulevard du Montparnasse’s zebra crosswalk. Not there forty-eight hours and René had gone Zeelakon Vallaaaay all the way. She hit dial back. No connection.

Just when she needed to talk to someone, throw ideas back and forth like they always had. She needed help reasoning out why Luebet got shoved in front of the Métro.

No doubt René had the corporate jet at his beck and call. She walled up the disappointment. No time for that now. The sky opened and she ran for shelter in a doorway.

La giboulée issued an intense pelting shower, then five wet minutes later layers of blue sky appeared. She shivered in her damp boots. Now confident no one had followed her, she hurried along the rain-spattered boulevard to Luebet’s art gallery. Shuttered and dark. He’d been lured out of a meeting and murdered.

But she couldn’t prove that. The only documented connection between Yuri’s torture and murder and Luebet’s supposed Métro accident was the painting in the photo. Yuri and Luebet were the only ones who could have verified the Modigliani’s existence except whoever took the photo. No doubt the same person who’d stolen it.

Oleg, the stepson? The dead Serb’s partner, the brother?

Or Aimée’s mother?

Whoever had known that Yuri had dined at his stepson’s last night also knew what time to steal it.

Her cell phone blinked with one message. The insurance company giving her repair quotes for the cars’ damages. She sighed, tempted to ignore this particular problem, given René’s millions and the fact that Yuri was gone. But that wouldn’t make it right.

Nearby on Boulevard Raspail, inside the AXA insurance office, she stared at the estimated vehicle damages. The base of her spine went weak. She could blow a kiss goodbye to a chunk of the incoming Arident check. Doing the right thing would cost her.

But she nodded assent, signed the triplicate form and handed it back to the clerk, a young woman all in brown, which only highlighted her already mouse-like appearance. Brown—the new black?

Now she had another reason to reach Oleg—the insurance money. No one turned down the offer of money.

She rang the office. “How’s it going, Maxence?”

“You sound different,” Maxence said. “Something wrong?”

Should she tell him, confide in this young kid?

“Just worried about Saj,” she said, crossing Raspail again and realizing she’d left her scooter at the museum. Merde. “Any word from him or the hospital?”

“Not yet.”

She walked by the small tree-lined park on rue Campagne Première, which fronted the glinting tiled art-nouveau façade of artist ateliers. When she had been in the lycée, their art teacher brought the class here for a vernissage, an art opening. She and Martine had snuck out to smoke. And gotten caught.

“Contracts faxed, Aimée. Backups made. Files complete,” Maxence was saying. “Have to go to my evening class now.”

“Call me impressed, Maxence,” she said. “I’ll finish up.”

“You’ll find printouts concerning old man Volodya on your desk,” he said, that Québécois roll to his words. “Did a Damien Perret call you?”

Just the man she wanted to see.

“I gave him your number,” Maxence said. A long pause. “Do you, I mean, want me back?”

Poor kid, on the job by himself all day. Wondering if she’d left him at sea.

“Maxence, consider yourself our intern,” she said. “You’ve impressed the hell out of me. See you tomorrow.”

Aimée checked the cell phone, scrolled through the numbers. Found Damien’s—no answer—and left him a message. She’d give him an earful on his employee Florent after she questioned him.

Gravel had lodged in her damp boot. Great. Leaning against the fence, she shook out the gravel and reminded herself to breathe. Her mind drifted to their lycée art teacher telling the class how in the eighteenth century this had been a country path leading to fields and farmland. How Montparnasse took its name—Mont, or hill, and Parnassus, the mythological home to Greek muses—from the seventeenth-century Sorbonne students who came here to recite poetry. The hill and students both long gone.

Now she wished she’d paid more attention to his stories. She remembered something about cabarets dating from the Revolution, les guinguettes—the dance halls all lieux de plaisir—where the bourgeoisie mingled with the artisans and working class in what had been an outlying quartier. Later, the avant-garde came, attracted by the cheap rents and blossoming Surrealist costume balls. Then, as now, the Breton presence near Gare Montparnasse, the station linking Paris to Brittany, established a Breton culture in the quartier. And the best crêpes in town. She remembered her teacher telling of the marché aux modèles, the street market where artists hired grisettes—women working as seamstresses or milliners—to model. The market had been held at the boulevard’s end before the First World War. Modigliani’s time. The going rate for models to pose was five francs for three hours.

She passed a rain-beaded plaque that listed Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp as one-time residents on the painted geranium-fronted hotel. A former one star, the hotel had now jumped to three stars for the remodeled ambience.

She couldn’t ignore the present: two deaths, a missing Modigliani. Her mother, mysteriously returned after more than two decades? What did it all mean? But she knew in her bones finding the Modigliani would lead to her mother. She had to find it.

And to pick up her scooter. With no taxi in sight, she headed to the bus stop. She pulled on her cap and her oversize sunglasses, walking briskly past the dark cream stone enclosing the misted Montparnasse cemetery.

Five minutes later she emerged from rue Delambre by Café du Dome, where aproned men shucked oysters on ice and waiters added lemons to platters of fruits des mer. She crossed Boulevard du Montparnasse. Patrons grouped on rattan chairs under the red façade of Café de la Rotonde, the fat thirties-style neon letters of its marquee a beacon.

She thought of Piotr Volodya’s faded blue letter in her bag, the letter Yuri never received. Tried visualizing the ascetic Lenin huddled with Trotsky; Modigliani with a red scarf dancing on a table; his model, sloe-eyed Kiki, once dubbed “Queen of Montparnasse.”

But the black Mercedes pulling up in front of la Rotonde brought her back to the present as it ejected a shouting group of footballers onto the pavement. Though not a sports fan, she recognized the drunk soccer star swinging from the Mercedes door. His face was plastered on every sports page on the newsstand. This young man from Marseille was the star of Les Bleus, the national team, who were aiming for the World Cup, which would be held this summer at the new Stade de France.

Traffic snarled at a standstill. Her eye caught on the blonde miniskirted girlfriend and groupies behind the footballer. A dark-suited bodyguard herded them back toward the limo. One of the blondes threw her arms around the bodyguard, kissing him. Aimée’s heart jerked. She recognized this bodyguard who was now energetically returning the blonde’s long kiss.

Melac.

She stood frozen on the pavement, watching the door shut and the limo pull away down Boulevard du Montparnasse. A passerby snorted in disgust. “The team’s goalkeeper, partying … typical.”

Had her dark glasses deceived her? Melac, former Brigade Criminelle detective, the man she was supposedly in a relationship with, who’d taken a new assignment he couldn’t talk about? Gone incommunicado. The man who just last week had wanted to move in with her?

SHE SAT IN Leduc Detective alone, cocooned with memories, warming her feet at the sputtering radiator. Looking down on her from the nineteenth-century wood-paneled wall was an old photo she’d discovered of her grand-père and Papa as a young boy fishing on the misted quai, a haze of black and white. She was surrounded by ghosts.

She wondered how she could keep the agency afloat. If she even wanted to. First René gone on to greener pastures. Now Saj injured—if he could even return. She was reduced to counting on a teenage intern, who seemed capable of running her business well enough without her. How long could she even keep him?

And the deeper sting, this charade played by Melac. To think she’d fallen for it.

The chandelier’s light suffused her mahogany desk in a soft glow. She stared at her mocha-lacquered toenails on the radiator. Too long since they’d had a touch-up, too.

Melac kissing the blonde at la Rotonde replayed in her mind. She turned over what she knew about his supposed promotion, which would ease his alimony payments—his hush-hush position linked to the ministry, or so he’d implied.

Lies. He worked both jobs, by day still a flic, moonlighting as a pimp handler for sports celebrities. It made her sick.

Nothing new. She’d witnessed men in the force with her father lose their families, gamble, remarry, and moonlight more to pay more alimony. A spiral of debt and divorce.

Useless to sit and dwell on Melac’s gray eyes, those warm arms around her, his lime scent that lingered on her sheets. The weekend in Strasbourg they’d planned. Never trust a flic, it never worked out.

She debated, then punched in his number, hating herself. Hated herself more when it went to voice mail. Forget leaving a message—better to tell him off in person. Or not. Expose herself to face-to-face humiliation? Forget it.

He’d found a long-legged football groupie. Every male’s dream. And she’d thought, what? That he was different?

She had to admit it, she’d scored another relationship train wreck. She should have listened to that little voice of doubt. So different from Guy, her eye surgeon ex, who’d wanted her to forgo detective work, go suburban and be a doctor’s wife in Neuilly. Giving luncheons. Not that she’d considered it. Or Yves—she’d thought he was “the one,” but his ashes lay in Père Lachaise. She still wore his Turkish puzzle ring on her finger. But here she’d fallen for a flic. Against her own rules. What did she expect?

She pushed the hurt aside, determined to get over him. Feeling sorry for herself would get her nowhere. As her grand-mère said, spilt milk doesn’t fill the pitcher.

She’d start on her list right now.

Damien Perret’s number was busy. She tried Oleg Volodya again. Only voice mail. People didn’t answer their phones. It made her crazy.

With a sigh she picked up the printouts Maxence had left and started reading about Yuri Volodya. Engrossed, she didn’t notice the shadows lengthening in the window from rue du Louvre until the phone rang, startling her.

“Leduc Detective,” she said, reaching for a cigarette in her bag before remembering she’d quit. A glance at her watch told her in three more hours it would be two months.

“Aimée Leduc? It’s Damien Perret. I’ve been trying to reach you since you came to my.…”

“Printing works?” And your worker Florent attacked me? But she left that out. She popped a stick of cassis gum in her mouth. “Let’s meet at a café. Say fifteen minutes?”

A breath of expelled air came over the line. “I’ve been gone all day, we’re still running orders. I can’t leave.”

“Your deliveryman Florent around?”

“Florent? I fired him tonight. Why?”

Good.

“See you in twenty minutes,” she said and hung up before he could put her off.

At this time of night the Métro would be faster. She’d finish her reading later. She laced her red high-tops and headed for the door.

Until the bulge in her coat pocket reminded her to return her unlicensed Beretta to the desk drawer, and leave the old papers in the safe. She felt for her Swiss Army knife stowed in her bag’s makeup kit. Just in case. She double knotted a green leopard-print scarf around her neck and she was off.

AIMÉE SNEEZED AT the tang of hot oil and ink permeating the printing workshop. Two large presses pounded out colored sheets. With the loud chopping noises of industrial paper cutters, she couldn’t hear herself think.

“Damien around?” she shouted.

An older man in grease-stained overalls looked up and hit a lever. He gestured to another white-haired codger to take over the press. She followed him past a stairway leading up to a storeroom, then through a dark wood hallway. He pointed to an open door with a sign: CHEF DU BUREAU.

Harsh white light illuminated a scuffed wood desk, file cabinets, and streaked glass windows that looked unchanged since the fifties. Banners and posters she recognized from this morning’s demonstration were piled in the corner. The only concessions to the nineties were the desktop computer, fax machine, and laser printer.

She knocked on the open door. Damien, whom she recognized from after the accident, looked up from his desktop. Bags under his eyes, swollen red lids. He’d aged overnight. She contained her shock at this twenty-something’s haggard appearance.

“So you’re the one Madame Figuer called about. The art flic?”

Madame Figuer couldn’t keep a secret. The busybody. On top of that, Aimée had an awkward feeling she’d intruded on his tears.

“Then you know about Yuri,” she said.

“I can’t … believe it.”

Aimée sat on a wooden plank chair and watched him blow his nose with a blue bandanna. He reached for a water bottle and poured two glasses full, his hands shaking. She noticed the La Coalition armband by his computer.

Shaken over Yuri’s murder?

“Been gone all day and we’ve got to fill this order tonight before I.…” He took a breath. “Un moment, I’m sorry,” he said, scanning an invoice on his laptop.

Shaken all right. She reached for the glass and drank.

Done, he shut down the desktop. “Can we make this short? I need to handle an order.”

Having come all this way, she wouldn’t let him off before he answered her questions. “This won’t take long, Damien. It’s important we talk,” she said. “You know about what happened on Villa d’Alésia?”

He nodded.

“Did Yuri seem worried?”

Damien rubbed his cheek. “My aunt’s in the hospital, maybe I didn’t pay attention. I don’t know.” He was lean and muscular with wavy black hair that went down the nape of his neck. Handsome, wounded—her type. Well, maybe not bad boy enough.

Then she thought of Melac. Look what bad boy had gotten her.

She decided to test her hunch. “Did you not return my call because you’re scared of the Serb?”

“Serb?” Surprise filled his face. “Zut! Three hours ago I returned from my aunt’s hospital bed and found flics waiting to question me over Yuri’s murder.” His shaking hands spilled the glass of water. He wiped at the puddle with his bandanna. “Then they quizzed me over a painting.”

Aimée had no concrete reason to suspect him of anything, just his proximity to Yuri and the uneasiness in her gut. But he must know something, even if he wasn’t aware. She practiced her concerned look.

“Talk about a bad time,” she said. “I know it’s difficult for you now. But the police investigation is focused on a Serb, the man we ran over, in connection with the stolen painting.”

A lie, but they should be focusing on that.

“That Serb? The dead man in the street?” he said, trying to piece this together. “But how could he murder Yuri this morning? That makes no sense … unless you’re saying he was working with others?”

“I’m saying nothing,” she said. “Tell me about the portrait Yuri recovered from the rue Marie Rose cellar.”

Sadness filled his eyes. “Yuri told you, didn’t he?”

If he’d lived he would have. She nodded.

“Yuri’s the only one who believed in me,” he said, his voice choking. “It shouldn’t have happened.”

Alert to the different tone in his voice, she looked up. “What shouldn’t have happened?”

“If only I had.…” His voice trailed off.

Again that fear in his face. Then it was gone. Blaming himself?

“Done what, Damien?”

“Yuri called me this morning. Left a short message on my phone saying he didn’t need a ride to the art appraiser. But my aunt is dying, and I didn’t.…”

Aimée gripped her glass of water. “Did he say why he didn’t need a ride anymore?”

“He told me not to worry. That’s all.”

Odd. “But his painting was stolen last night.”

“That’s what he told me, too.” Damien shook his head. “So I just stayed at the hospital with my aunt all day. What an idiot I was. I should have gone to his studio.”

She understood his feelings of guilt. If only she’d arrived earlier herself. Those damn detours on the Left Bank. The protesters blocking rue d’Alésia.

Damien’s knuckles whitened on the edge of his desk. “The doctors gave my aunt days to live. That was a month ago.” A look of pain crossed his face. Genuine, as far as she could tell.

“Desolée, but if you could answer a few more questions?”

“My uncle left me this printing business tottering on its last legs.” Damien sighed. “Yuri mentored me. Now I’ve built up a clientele and have more orders than we can keep up with. I can keep the staff on. Support what I believe in.” She saw a hint of pride in the way he gestured to the posters.

Political, like Madame Figuer said. She needed to lead this back to Yuri. But a file with Florent’s ugly mug sat on his desk. She remembered Florent’s knee between her legs, his garlic breath on her neck, his strong arms.

“Your employee Florent.…”

“Him? Gone,” Damien said, his mouth pursed. “Turns out Florent was robbing the till. Yuri had suspected him all along. Turns out he was right.”

She sat up. Florent, the murderer. A straightforward revenge?

“So Florent held a grudge against Yuri?”

“Against me, bien sûr.” Damien expelled air.

“Why’s that? Aren’t you his boss? The one who gave him a job?”

“Called me a Commie. Jeered at our goals in La Coalition. Complained that I print the posters and banners for free to support the cause. But he liked Yuri.”

“Or until he found out Yuri suspected him,” Aimée said. “They argue, it turns nasty, and to stop him Florent—”

“I told the flics,” he interrupted. “Florent made deliveries in Levallois all morning.”

“You’re sure?”

Damien stood, a file tucked under his arm. “Believe me, the shop owner called complaining. The flics checked.” Damien’s fingers played with the file. “Florent’s father and grandfather worked here. No matter our differences, it made me sick to fire him.”

Aimée slammed down her empty water glass. “You’re naive. Florent attacked and almost raped me.”

“What?” Damien’s voice rose in shock.

“Open your eyes,” she said. “No one told you he was the type, eh?”

He shook his head. “Florent’s always caused trouble, but attacking you.…” He ran his ink-stained fingers through his hair. “I had no idea. That’s terrible. Désolé.”

She believed him.

“In 1900 this was a Russian press employing deaf mutes,” Damien said, his brow creased. “Yuri never let me forget. He insisted we had to continue, stay loyal to the quartier, the workshops. Hire locals. But now commerce has dwindled down to us, Dupont the chauffage manufacturer across the street, and Yuri’s bookbindery.”

A leftover nineteenth-century industrial Paris full of artists, publishers, bric-a-brac traders and craftspeople who saw themselves as the memory keepers of a time now forgotten. Underneath the peaceful and almost timeless look of the place, however, ran dark currents.

But she didn’t need a small business lecture.

“Granted, you’re not selling chocolates,” she said. She had to draw him out. “But the quartier’s still bohemian, cheaper but with a certain Montparnasse cachet.”

“Yuri said that too.” His lip quivered. “I just don’t want to believe Yuri’s gone.”

She needed to connect the dots. If she didn’t press for information, this would go nowhere. Time to appeal to his bond with Yuri. “Damien, this is important. Someone tortured Yuri to find the painting.”

“Tortured?” Damien’s mouth dropped open in horror.

“Madame Figuer didn’t tell you? We found him tied to his sink—beaten, tortured, then drowned.”

Shame, guilt, and something else crossed his face. “Who would have … hurt him like that?”

“Damien, I’d say you’re in danger, too.”

“Me?”

“Do the math,” she said. “Two of the three people who saw the painting are dead. You’re the third, non? You took this Polaroid.”

His intercom rang. Instead of answering he headed to the door. “Look, I’ve got orders to fill.”

“You helped Yuri clean out his father’s cellar, and he found this painting. Then you brought him to the art dealer to see if it was genuine.”

Damien turned. The printing presses chomped in the background. “Not me.”

“Then who did?”

“Why does it matter now?” He shook his head. His shoulders sagged as if in defeat.

“Someone shoved the art dealer in front of the Métro this afternoon.”

She couldn’t prove that.

“You should talk to Oleg,” Damien said. “He took Yuri to see the art dealer.”

Oleg. Her next stop. “Don’t you want to help me? Wasn’t Yuri your friend? Tell me everything you know.”

Damien rubbed his eyes. Hurt and bewildered, he looked out the window into the courtyard. Loaders filled stacks of posters into a camionnette.

He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. Saturday Yuri asked to borrow our camionnette. That one. To clean out his father’s cellar. I offered to help. You know, given his medications and all the times he’s helped me.”

Damien paused.

Aimée reined in her impatience. She knew all this. But maybe there was more.

“All full of garbage, old newspapers,” he went on. “But in the corner we found this small canvas, unrolled it. Amazing the rats hadn’t chewed it. A man wearing a green jacket. On the back it said, ‘For my friend Piotr,’ signed Modigliani.”

Just like in the old man’s letter. “Forgotten in a cellar. But why would Yuri’s father leave it there all these years?”

“I don’t know.”

Damien’s intercom bleeped again. “Shipment’s ready,” said a voice over the pounding of the printing presses. “We need your sign-off.”

Damien shrugged. “I’ve got work to do.”

Aimée followed him through the hall, waited until he’d signed off on the order. He motioned her outside.

The courtyard was dark except for the glow from the warehouse splashed on the wet cobbles. The chomping machines receded in the night.

“Yuri wanted the painting appraised. I told him to keep quiet until he knew the value. Hide it. But bien sûr he had to go opening his mouth, telling people.”

“Like who?”

“Besides his stepson, Oleg? Oleg’s wife, I’d imagine. The concierge who let us into the cellar, an Italian woman. The art appraiser. Then I don’t know who else.”

She needed to prod him more. “Oleg and Yuri didn’t get along, did they?”

“Yuri called me when I was at the hospital with my aunt to give him a ride home from Oleg’s. Oleg and his wife had invited him over for dinner—that was unusual. The dinner was a disaster, he said. They always wanted something, those two.” Damien glanced at the lighted windows of the printing works, checked his watch.

“Whoever tortured him won’t give up,” she said.

“Oleg schemed and plotted with that wife of his behind Yuri’s back,” Damien said.

And he hadn’t returned her call.

“Wanted him to make a new will, he told me. Yuri always complained about the wife, Tatyana. She’s the type who wears faux-designer clothes, always bragging of her connection to some oligarch’s wife. How they went to school together. One of those super-wealthy women with bodyguards, limos.”

Aimée didn’t understand how this fit in. “You’re saying there’s some connection?”

Damien shrugged.

But the painting had been gone by the time Yuri returned from dinner.

“Do you know where Yuri hid the painting?” she asked, trying to feel him out.

“Where he always hides … hid things. So he’d remember.” Damien’s lip quivered. “He usually forgot things. Even to take his medication.”

Yuri Volodya had seemed sharp enough last night, after the initial shock at finding his studio ransacked.

“And this morning when you spoke, did he mention a Serb?”

Damien shook his head and shrugged.

“Did you know when he was younger he was political, a Trotskyist? Did he talk about it? Stay in touch with those people?”

“Yuri?” A little laugh. “Never spoke about the past. Not to me anyway. More apolitical.”

Was that disappointment in his tone?

“No time for politics, he said. The books he crafted took up his life, even more so after his wife’s death.”

Frustrated, Aimée pulled her scarf tighter against the chill. “Didn’t anything about Yuri strike you as out of the ordinary in the past few days?”

Damien thought. “That’s right, he bought a disposable cell phone.”

“The kind that won’t get traced?” she said, interested. “That struck you as unusual. Why?”

“Yuri hated cell phones. Never wanted one.”

If the murderer hadn’t taken the phone, it would be in the police report.

She sensed more. “What else, Damien?”

“He carried on conversations in the garden, never inside. I asked him why.…” Damien paused, pensive. “Said the fixer wanted it that way.”

“The fixer? Did he explain?”

Again Damien shook his head.

“But you think this fixer is involved with the painting somehow?”

“How would I know?”

Aimée’s phone vibrated. Oleg’s number showed up. A message.

“Letterpress rotor’s jammed,” a voice shouted from inside the printing works.

The last thing she saw was Damien’s shadow filling the doorway before he disappeared without a goodbye.

AFTER LISTENING TO Oleg’s message, Aimée took the Métro two stops and emerged into the clear, crisp evening in front of the spotlighted Lion de Belfort statue, the centerpiece of the Denfert-Rochereau roundabout. The bronze lion’s cocked head was wreathed in a wilting daisy chain—a student prank.

To her left lay the shadowy, gated Catacombs entrance.

Her mind went back to another rainy day in early spring—the week after her mother left, when she was eight years old. Her father was working surveillance—like always, it seemed, during her childhood. That day, Morbier picked her up late from school. A trip to the Catacombs, he promised, for a special commemorative ceremony. She remembered the fogged-up bus windows, the oil-slicked rainbow puddles, arriving late to the ceremony in the Catacombs. The old woman describing how the Resistance had used the tunnels as a command post in the days preceding liberation.

As if it had been yesterday, Aimée could still feel her wet rainboots and heavy school bag on her shoulder. See those walls of bare bones illuminated by bulbs hanging from a single wire. Feel that jolting terror at the mountains of skulls. So terrified she wanted Morbier to carry her. But he’d ducked his head under the timbers. Afraid he’d call her a baby, she tried to keep up, tramping through the webbed limestone tunnels lined with hundreds of thousands of bones. So scared, wanting to close her eyes. Wrinkling her nose at the musty dirt-laced odor of the departed. Shivering at the chill emanating from the earth.

“Were you a soldier, Parrain?” She’d called him godfather until she was ten. She tugged his sleeve until he slowed down.

“I was only a boy during the war, but my father helped the Resistance,” he said.

“But you said your papa worked on the trains.”

“So he did. But in secret he brought Colonel Rol-Tanguy the rail plans to sabotage the Wehrmacht freight in the Gare de Lyon yards.”

“Did they hide here?” she asked, wondering why anyone would.

Morbier ground his foot in the packed dirt. “You could hide here forever.”

“Weren’t they scared?”

“Scared?” He shook his head. Then his thick eyebrows knit. He opened his mouth to say something. Didn’t.

She watched him, surprised, her fear forgotten now. “Why are you sad, Parrain?”

“It happened a long time ago now. People forget.”

“So we’re in this smelly cave piled with bones to remember?”

“Something like that.” He paused, his eyes faraway. “They say if you don’t remember the past, you’re condemned to repeat it, mon petit chou.”

She’d taken his big hand with her small one and squeezed it.

Aimée shook off the memories. On rue Daguerre, a lighted pedestrian shopping street, the evening air carried pungent aromas from the cheese shop. Below a whipping awning stood the butcher Alois in his bloodstained apron. He waved at her. She stocked up here on Miles Davis’s horse meat.

This evening, Café Daguerre’s outdoor café tables bustled on the terrace. She picked her way past the crowded tables to the interior, scanning the patrons: locals, middle-aged women, old men with baguettes and chives poking from their shopping bags—drinking an aperitif before heading home for dinner.

For a brief moment, she thought about how she’d intended to cook more—but since boiling water presented a challenge to her culinary skills, she discarded the thought.

“Un express,” she said, sitting at the counter and catching the scurrying white-aproned waiter. Next to her a young woman cut into a scallion-fringed croque-madame, on a thick-crusted slice of Poilâne bread. Tempting.

Instead she opened her agenda to the to-do list she’d begun after reading that Marie Claire article. Plan, set goals, and prioritize. She ticked off “proposals filed,” “security checks run”—thanks to Maxence—and “butcher’s for Miles Davis.” Under the pending column, she crossed off “René’s tuxedo” and added “autopsy findings,” “fitting for the Dior bridesmaid dress,” “pick up software encrypter.” She also added “Yuri,” “Serb,” and “car repair,” and considered whether telling off Melac warranted inclusion on the list.

No doubt she’d get his voice mail if she tried calling again. She put “Melac” in the future column; she’d deal with him later. Now to Oleg. She’d escaped before the police questioning—he’d be ignorant of the fact that she’d discovered Yuri murdered or that she had Piotr’s letters. Two up on him. Always a good thing when facing a suspect.

“Aimée Leduc?”

She turned to see Oleg, tousled brown hair, corduroy pants and denim jacket—an academic air.

“The flic told me you were in the car that smashed Yuri’s Merc,” he said. “Ran over and killed a man in front of his house.”

Belligerent and breathless. Not even a bonsoir.

“We had an accident. I’ve filed the insurance claim, everything will be handled. But your stepfather wasn’t hurt.” What’s that to you, she wanted to say, moving away from his crowding elbow.

“Maybe you had something to do with my father’s murder this morning.”

He’d turned the tables. Accused her.

The waiter slid Aimée’s express in front of her. “Monsieur, something to drink?” he asked, poker-faced.

Oleg pointed to Aimée’s cup. “The same.” The waiter nodded and moved down the counter.

“Yuri told me you’re the son of his wife,” she said, unwrapping a sugar cube and plopping it in her espresso. “So you have no legal grounds in any of this. I’ll deal with his lawyer about the car.”

“I’m the only family Yuri had.” Oleg drummed his nail-bitten fingers on the counter. “We’ve kept him company since my mother passed. He was lonely, had bad health.”

And you’d been sniffing around for an inheritance, according to his neighbor and Natasha at the nursing home. Oleg might qualify as extended family, but everything told her to keep Piotr Volodya’s letters in her bag.

“Not that it’s my business,” she said, taking a sip, “but Yuri intimated otherwise last night. Nine times out of ten, it’s the family the flics find guilty of crime. I’d keep that in mind before you accuse me, a stranger.”

Oleg stared as the waiter set down a salade niçoise in front of a young woman wearing slim, black cigarette pants. Aimée recognized them from the latest agnès b. collection. Eating salad—no wonder she could wear size two.

But Oleg looked hungry. Why didn’t he order one? Cheap.

“Robbery. Murder.” She took another sip. “Your supposed inheritance, I’d imagine, would be their line of inquiry. It comes down to motive.”

“But he was at our house for dinner just last night. My wife cooked his favorite dish.”

“Yuri’s place was trashed,” she said. “He told me a valuable painting had been stolen.”

Oleg stared at her. “So you’re the detective he asked to help.”

He’d put things together fast.

“Quite a coincidence, eh? Running someone over, hitting Yuri’s car.” Oleg leaned closer. “Maybe you set him up, robbed him, and appeared to offer your services with a nice cash reward.”

This man was geting on her nerves. His affected academic air, his insinuations. His incessant drumming on the counter with his nail-bitten fingers. Ignoring café etiquette.

“Funny, that never crossed my mind,” she said, clenching the demitasse spoon. She wanted to slam it on his drumming fingers. “My colleague’s up for possible manslaughter, Yuri’s murdered, and you’re accusing me? Turn it around—say you hired someone to rob Yuri and it backfired?” She paused. “You don’t seem upset over his murder.”

Oleg’s mouth parted in surprise. Deflated, he stared at the water rings on the zinc countertop.

“What happened?” She needed to know his take.

“You won’t understand.” He shook his head.

“Try me.”

“Yuri abandoned me,” Oleg said, “like his father had done to him. Some role model. My mother sent me to boarding school when I was six. It broke her heart.” He shrugged. “Still, we’re the only family each other has … had, now. Alors, he liked to complain about Tatyana’s cooking but he ate it.”

Hurt showed in Oleg’s eyes. She believed him. The only thing he’d said that rang true.

“Mon Dieu, such a big mouth, he told everyone about that painting. Damien, the art dealer.…”

Just what Damien had said. Poor Yuri, his big mouth had gotten him killed. And yet, she hadn’t been able to get the story out of him. Sad and frustrating.

“You took him to Luebet, the art dealer, when?”

“Sunday. We warned him to put the painting away. Hide it. At least until this morning.”

Part of her wanted to believe him. The other part figured he was telling a version of the truth.

“He called me after the accident last night,” Oleg said. “Told me he’d spoken with you. Hired you.”

She chose her words. “Hired me?”

“To recover the Modigliani.”

“A Modigliani?”

“Don’t play dumb. He called you, didn’t he?”

“Not dumb, cautious.” She decided to trust him. A little bit.

“But why would someone torture him for a painting that was already stolen?” Oleg said, his brow creased.

Aimée wondered the same thing. She pulled out Luebet’s Polaroid. “Of the four people who’ve seen the painting, only you and Damien are still alive.” She left out his wife. “Did you take this?”

Oleg stared at the photo.

“Doesn’t do the painting justice,” he said. “Even in the humidity, that dim light, the shadows, the painting … it spoke.” Oleg’s eyes glowed.

“Go on.” Oleg seemed more than acquainted with the art world, from the way he spoke. “You’re an artist?”

“When I was at boarding school, every Sunday I was the only boarder who never went home.” Self-pity stained his voice. “The art teacher used to take me to the musées in Bordeaux.”

“Now you’re an art teacher, that it?”

“You’re a detective, all right,” he said with sarcasm that could have sliced stale bread.

The mirror behind the counter reflected the gauzy, fleecelike light from rue Daguerre’s street lamps.

Oleg reached for his espresso. “This glimpse into Lenin moved me.” He turned and his eyes pierced her. “Where is it?”

She almost choked on her espresso. “Like I know?”

His cell phone vibrated on the polished wood counter, but he ignored it. Oleg patted his jacket pocket, turned his back to her. In the mirror behind the counter, she saw him checking something from his pocket—what looked like a glossy hotel brochure with a logo she couldn’t make out.

She averted her eyes as he turned back.

“Your stepfather wouldn’t make a robbery report,” she said, switching to another tack. “That only makes sense if he feared something.”

Oleg ground his teeth. “Do you speak Russian?”

She shook her head. “Do you?”

“My wife, Tatyana, is from Ukraine.”

“Meaning you don’t and she does.”

He didn’t deny it. She had no idea why he had asked her in the first place.

“I don’t know why, but he trusted you.” Oleg hung his head. “More than me.”

And then she understood. “He knew my … mother.” The word caught in her throat. Sounded strange coming out of her mouth.

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, you just said—”

“We never got that far, Oleg.”

Her mother—words never spoken by her father, never used while she grew up. This phantom spirit in the house no one ever talked about. Like the elephant in the salon everyone pretended not to see.

She came back to the conversations in the café, the hiss of the milk steamer, what Oleg was saying. “Yuri asked me to find a buyer.”

Should she believe him?

“I’ve got someone who’s interested.”

His cell phone vibrated non-stop.

“What do I do?” Oleg looked lost.

He was asking her?

“Besides ignore that call?” She leaned closer. “If you didn’t steal the painting, who do you think did? Your stepfather hired me before he discovered it was missing—why? Threats, extortion?”

“He told me he owed someone.”

Yuri’s words about owing her mother thudded through her mind.

“Like who? Any specifics?”

“A woman—oui, that’s right.”

“Did he let on why? Their connection?”

“I thought you were the detective,” Oleg said, standing up abruptly. “Fat lot of help you’ve been to me.”

A swish of air and he’d gone. Left half his espresso and her with the bill. Her gaze followed him to an idling late-model Peugeot, a blonde at the wheel. She glimpsed a flash of something red as he opened the door. Then the car roared away down Avenue du Général Leclerc.

Aimée’s mind spun. Was Oleg playing an elaborate game? Had the painting been stolen while Yuri dined at his house? Was he pretending he didn’t have it to force her hand, find out what she knew, what Yuri might have confided in her? But that was all conjecture.

When you hit a wall, think of the opposite scenario, her father always said.

What if Oleg figured she knew the painting’s whereabouts? And he clutched at her connection because of what Yuri had led him to believe?

Had her mother stolen the painting? Aimée’s stomach clenched. In Yuri’s last message, he had been adamant that she leave it alone. Too dangerous.

Crazy. She had to stop these crazy thoughts.

But she’d learned that he had a buyer. A buyer and, she was guessing, no painting. That’s why he’d met her.

In his shoes, she’d be off to stall the buyer. Hold him or her in the wings until the painting surfaced. Or, if he was the one who stole it, until attention died down and it was safe to sell it.

Oleg hadn’t even hounded her for money for Yuri’s damaged Mercedes.

A race to recover the Modigliani and she’d gotten ensnared in it. She downed her espresso, caught the waiter’s attention, and slid some francs over the counter.

“Your friend uses our café as a meeting place,” the waiter said as he made change. “But he doesn’t pay for his drink?”

She pushed the coins back at him. Waiters knew the clientele in the quartier. “But I bet his father Yuri did.”

A shrug. “Old Russian, gray hair?”

“The bookbinder,” she said.

“That’s right.” He nodded and smiled. “All that Russian winter of the soul.”

A waiter quoting literature? She tried to remember if that had been a question on the baccalaureate exam. Or had René, a voracious reader, quoted that from a crime novel?

He noticed her quizzical look. “Tolstoy.”

RIDING THE MÉTRO back, she took out her to-do list, wrote down:

Damien

Oleg—nervous

Letters

Off rue de Rivoli, she stood in line for takeout salade niçoise, thinking of those black agnès b. cigarette pants. She needed to lose a kilo before she’d be back to her normal size. Awful. She’d never let this happen before. Time to swim laps.

For the second time she called Morbier to check if he’d pulled strings for Saj. Only voice mail. She left a message for him to call her back. Frustrated, she tried the criminal ward at Hôtel-Dieu. A new nurse who refused to give her any information.

Tired of voice mail and people who gave her the runaround, she headed to her office. She had reports to finish up, a security scan to run. And Maxence’s printouts on Yuri Volodya to go through. But when she punched in the entry code on the keypad, no answering click opened the door. Merde. On the blink again.

She searched in her bag, dropped the boxed salad, and found the old key after a minute. Picking up the salad, she inserted the key, turned it twice, and finally the tumbler turned. She’d complain to the concierge. First the lift didn’t work, then the door. Always something. And a long, empty evening of work ahead.

She hit the timed light. Nothing happened.

Then she heard scuffling, felt a whoosh of cold air.

“What the …?”

Before she could turn in the darkness, something was pulled over her head. And then everything went black.