Murder Below Montparnasse

Wednesday


MORGANE RAN ACROSS the cobbles into the rainy courtyard. Shivering and wet, she glanced up at their curtained window. Untouched since she’d left.

Just as she feared, Flèche had gone out to locate the painting his way. Intimidation, his usual métier. Now she’d insist they do it her way or she’d let him loose.

“The new phone books arrived,” said the agoraphobe, peeking out from her ground-floor window. “Every tenant takes their own. Not my responsibility, as I told your husband on his way out.”

Always observant, this one. Morgane leaned down and picked up the heavy plastic-wrapped directory. “I’ll take it, merci.”

Water ran from the roof tiles, splashed in silver eruptions, missing the rusted drain. On the damp landing she shifted the directory under her arm to unlock the door, and a blow hit her in the middle of her back. The air was knocked out of her. She stumbled forward, the directory falling on her foot. But not before her wrists were grabbed behind her and a bag pulled over her head.

Stupid. Phone books wouldn’t be out for a few months. Such an old trick and she’d fallen for it. No doubt the attacker had bribed the agoraphobe.

Hands pressed her shoulders down and plunked her on the floor.

“You salaud,” she said, “this won’t get you anywhere, you.…”

No answer. Only the systematic sounds of drawers opening, the few pieces of furniture being turned upside down, taut mattress fabric ripping. Professional. Her neck stiffened.

“What the hell do you think you’ll find?”

“The unexpected,” a voice said. “Looks like you’re in the dark in more ways than one. No clue to the painting, n’est-ce pas?”

“Who are you?”

Objects rained on her lap. Something damp leaked on her leg. The familiar smell of Miss Dior flooded her nostrils. Whoever this was had emptied her bag. She heard papers rustling, the jingle of coins, keys … her wallet?

Clicking. “I thought so. Two calls to Luebet, your boss.”

“Who are you?”

“He can’t answer anymore,” the voice said. “They scooped what’s left of him from the Métro tracks.”

Panic filled her. “You mean you …? Listen, he gave me orders by phone.”

“Liar.”

“Told me if we didn’t find the painting, he wouldn’t pay.”

Sigh. “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you right now.”

Morgane’s chest heaved. “Shoot me now and you get what? The painting’s disappeared.”

“So you’re just a hired hand?”

“Luebet didn’t hire me for my looks.” Her thoughts raced. “You’re some rogue flic?”

A short laugh. “Worse. I think you need to convince me, Morgane.”

Nothing for it but to tell the whole story. “Alors, five years ago, I worked in his gallery, lifted a series of Chagall lithographs from him. Long story. After I got out of prison, my son was diagnosed with leukemia. Then Luebet called me a week ago, told me we’re good now but he needs help. A job. He couldn’t do it, but I could. Like I’d refuse?” The cold floor against her legs chilled her.

“This photo in your wallet,” the voice said, “your son?”

A sob rose in her throat. “Please don’t touch him … he’s sick, please.”

More rustling paper. “There’s a Swiss Clinic bill …?”

“My son needs a bone marrow transplant.” Her throat caught. “I need money. I’ll do anything.”

“How did you plan to transport the painting?”

“But our man got there too late, there was no painting.”

“Answer the question.”

“My cargo freight contact at Orly.”

A cough. “So, mother of the year, why threaten the private detective?”

“Who?”

“Don’t play innocent.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

The key turned in the door.

“That’s Flèche,” Morgane whispered. “An amateur. He went off half-cocked last night. Wouldn’t listen, uncontrollable … I don’t know what he’s done.”

“Hope you’re telling the truth,” the voice hissed in her ear, “for your son’s sake.”

“Who the hell are you?” Flèche’s words hung in the air. “Look, put the gun down, we’ll talk about the painting. We don’t have it, but I’ve got a lead … just calm down.”

“What lead?”

“Plenty in the pot for everyone,” he said. “The bitch will lead us to the fixer.”

A short laugh. The door closed. Morgane heard footsteps. The rustle of fabric. Flèche kept a knife strapped to his calf under his jeans. If only she could get out of the way … but she couldn’t see. Couldn’t move.

“Why’s the fixer important?”

“The old geezer hid the painting,” Flèche said. “The bitch told me everything. We stuck her head under water like they did to the old geezer.…”

Morgane struggled but her wrists didn’t budge. “Idiot,” she said. “You won’t find the painting that way.”

As she’d feared, Flèche had rushed in headlong and now half the world would know. He’d brought attention and trouble to the door. If only she could cut her losses. Run.

“She’s right,” the voice said. Morgane realized now it was a woman’s voice. Low, rasping, a foreign accent. “So that was you. Are you going to do that again?”

“I’m on that Leduc until she coughs up, or else …” Flèche said.

Morgane heard the hiss of a match lighting. A swift inhale. Could taste the plume of smoke Flèche exhaled. Idiot.

“Or else what?” the woman asked in that curious accent.

“I’ll make her talk.”

“Wrong answer. Pity, Flèche. Stupid nickname—for an arrow, you’re dull as a post.”

“Tant pis,” Flèche said, his footsteps moving past her. That smell of cigarettes that clung to his clothes. “You want a bigger cut, why do you deserve it?”

She had to warn this woman. Even though she’d attacked Morgane, bound her and threatened her, Morgane trusted her more than this idiot who’d get her killed.

“He’s got a knife strapped to his leg,” she said.

“That’s too bad, Flèche. I don’t like uncooperative types.”

Morgane heard the unmistakable sound of a revolver cartridge clicking into place. An intake of breath.

“And no need to look for the fixer anymore,” the woman said. “Here I am.”

“What the …?”

The rest was drowned in the crack of a gunshot. Morgane tried to make herself small. Sounds of shattering glass and a loud thump on the floor next to her. What felt like a man’s arm—Flèche’s—hitting her shoulder. Morgane shivered in terror. Then an oozing, warm wetness on her sleeve. That metallic smell. Her fingers came back sticky with blood.

She tried to scream but it froze in her throat. Nothing came out.

Her body tensed, expecting the gunshot. Expecting to die. But she couldn’t force her mouth open to plead for her life. Could only sputter a few words. “My son … needs me … I beg you.…”

Only the chill draft from an open door answered her.





Wednesday


DOUBTS CLOGGED AIMÉE’S mind like the leaves stuck in the quai’s rain-swollen gutters. Dombasle’s informant antiquaire orchestrating a buy of a Modigliani at the flea market—it all seemed too easy.

Or maybe she was paranoid.

But it reminded her of the apricot tart her grandmother left to cool on the windowsill one long-ago summer afternoon—a flock of crows had swooped down and left not even a crumb. Was there a swarm of scavengers picking each other off for the prize?

She needed a plan, quick and dirty. Grabbed her cell phone.

Oleg answered on the first ring.

“Mademoiselle Leduc, you’ve thought of something? Want to talk?”

Still rude. He’d kept her number on his caller ID.

“Call off the Serbs and I’m more than ready.”

A snort. “I don’t understand.”

Damp air laced with the fresh scent of rain hovered on the quai. Aimée shook the water off her Vespa cover, took out her keys, and shouldered her bag. The sporadic showers made one feel damp all the time, her grand-mère used to complain. Nothing ever dried.

“Didn’t you send the goon last night to plunge my head in a bucket, like he tortured your stepfather?”

A swift intake of breath. “What?”

“Lucky my godfather’s a flic and—”

“Nothing to do with me,” Oleg interrupted. “You’re wrong.”

A bus whooshed by, spraying water from the puddles. She stepped back but not in time. Droplets shimmered on her leather leggings. “Act like that,” she said, irritated, wiping herself off with a café napkin from her bag. “No information then.”

“Either you have the Modigliani or you don’t,” he said.

This wasn’t going well. Accusing him might not have been the best plan. But she had a feeling.

“Oleg, you’re in the dark with a buyer and no painting,” she said. “Guess we’ve got nothing to talk about.”

“Attends, I never intended for this to get out of hand.”

Her foot paused on the kickstart. Her hand gripped the phone. “What do you mean?”

“The buyer’s anxious.”

“So you hire someone to threaten me?”

“Never. You’re crazy.” His voice rose a notch.

“But to kill your own—”

“I’d never hurt Yuri. Ever.”

“Expect me to believe that? He sent you away, never regarded you as his.…”

“Son?” Oleg said. “You don’t understand. Tatyana—we never thought the Serb would die. That you’d run him over.”

Realization hit her gut. “You hired the Serb.”

“A fiasco.” He’d admitted it.

“The Serb bought it before he hit our windshield,” Aimée said. “His partner’s an angry dog and I want him brought to heel or—”

“What can I do?” His breath caught. “A simple job.…” What sounded like a sob erupted. He sounded afraid. “But I never hired anyone to hurt you. Or Yuri. Don’t you get it?”

She believed him. He sounded in over his head. But he was withholding something. She leaned on the quai’s stone wall, overlooking the rippling Seine. Below chugged a long, open barge loaded with sand like she remembered from years ago. Didn’t see many of those these days.

“Then explain. I’m listening, Oleg.”

“Tatyana knew someone who knew someone,” he said finally.

“Too vague, Oleg.”

“A word here and there, back channels, I don’t know,” he said. “Zut, part of me wanted Yuri to keep it. A family heirloom.”

His depiction of himself as a solicitous stepson contradicted Madame Figuer’s, Natasha’s, and Damien’s accounts. Again, that suspicion niggled—had he stolen the painting and concocted an elaborate scheme to derail the flics? And now answered her call to find out what she knew?

“I wish we could have kept that painting. The Modigliani spoke to me, I told you,” Oleg said. “But we’re working people. Tatyana convinced me, said this buyer has a private museum, people would admire it. Yuri needed money for an operation. I thought he’d come around, given time.”

She doubted that part. Yuri was a feisty old goat who wanted things his way. Hadn’t he “hired” her?

“You invited him over for dinner, Tatyana cooked his favorite meal. But he refused to let you sell the painting,” she said. “Ruined your plans. He’d found a fixer to handle the painting.”

A sigh. “He told you all this, then you know.…”

She wouldn’t disabuse him of the idea that Yuri had confided in her. Or reveal that she knew nothing.

“But someone stole the Modigliani before the Serb got there,” Oleg said. “And now his brother’s demanding payment. A job’s a job, he insists, no matter the outcome.”

That she could believe.

“Call him off, Oleg.”

“Believe me, I want to,” he said. “I tried.”

“Tried, Oleg? Tell me how you contacted him.”

“By cell phone, but he doesn’t answer.”

Why couldn’t he just spit it out?

“Give me his number. He’s gone vigilante on my colleague.”

Pause.

She wanted to kick him. Raised her voice. “Now, Oleg. I need it”

Aimée reached in her bag, grabbed a pen from the car insurance company, and wrote the number on her palm. A seagull strutted down the wall, squawking. She covered her other ear to hear better.

“Tell me who else wanted the Modigliani,” Aimée said.

“I don’t know.”

Holding back again.

“I think you do, Oleg,” she said. “There was blood on the wall.”

“Look, I’ll give you a percentage,” he said, sounding rushed now. “Think it over.”

He thought she wanted in on the profit. Thought she knew the painting’s whereabouts. Damien’s words came back to her. “But Damien heard you argue that night.”

“That bleeding heart?” Oleg said. “Damien should mind his own business. Yuri never gave me a chance whenever I tried to help him. But Mr. Do-Gooder’s always at his beck and call, when he’s not demonstrating, or at the hospital with his dying aunt. He wants first place in line for her inheritance.”

“Funny, he said the same thing about you.”

Oleg hung up.

As long as Oleg thought she had access to the painting, she had value. But he might have already told her everything he knew. The desperation in his voice sounded real enough.

Aimée tried the Serb’s phone number. Out of service. A disposable phone. And a dead end.

She kicked loose gravel at the stone wall. Alarmed, the seagull took off, his wings making a flapping whoosh as he skimmed the dimpled surface of the green-brown Seine. The color reminded her of lentil soup.

She rang Saj. Gave him the latest.

“What did you expect, Aimée? Thought the Serb would answer and apologize?” Saj sounded worried. “Like a slap on the wrist would make any of them walk away? High stakes like this?”

She figured these were rhetorical questions. “Bon, Oleg lives not far from Yuri in the fourteenth.…”

“So pay him a visit,” Saj said. “Meanwhile, since I don’t have the thumb-drive prototype.…” He paused. “I’d like the anti-malware program that’s in the drawer at my computer desk at my place. Can you stop by? Grab my stress busters while you’re at it?”

Her neck felt hot with shame. “Don’t tell me you came from the hospital to the office without even going home?”

“Good thing, too, with you getting attacked,” he said. “Someone’s got to mind the office with René gone. Look, I want to keep the business going, forget what I said before.”

Guilt riddled her. Unlike René, loyal Saj stuck with her. And he needed help in return.

“Bien sûr, Saj.”

After punching in 12 for directory assistance, she found Oleg’s address. One bit of luck, thank God. First she’d stop at Saj’s—the least she could do. And it was en route. She donned her helmet again and gunned her scooter to the Left Bank. Not ten minutes from Yuri’s on Villa d’Alésia lay rue des Thermopolyes, a village-like street battling developers. She saw the jagged walls of half-demolished buildings with a faded Dubonnet sign, the abandoned plot an attempt at a community garden with a rusted pinwheel turning in the wind. Farther on, she passed pastel two- and three-story maisonettes, painstakingly restored, and the taffy brick walls of the occasional small workshop. Saj lived in one of these.

A churchbell chimed in the distance. Pastoral and quiet. She keyed in his door code and reached his studio on the second floor. Diffused light from the slanted glass roof bathed the former workshop in a clouded vanilla. On the oblong window facing the courtyard, something was painted in red, like graffiti. Art? But when she got closer, she saw the misspelled words slashed like blood spatter: I’ll get you murderrer.

Her heart jumped into her throat. She gasped. Stepped back, and stumbled on Saj’s pile of encryption manuals. She didn’t need a high IQ to know the handiwork of a Serb bent on vengeance.

A creak behind her startled her and she turned to see a female figure in black Goth garb. “Can’t get away this time.”

Aimée dove under Saj’s kitchen table just in time to avoid the swinging scythe. She scooted on her hands and knees as fast as she could over the tatami mat. “Hold on, I’m Saj’s friend,” she said, meeting the woman’s heavily made-up eyes, black holes in her white face. “Who won’t get away?”

“Like I believe you? I heard those noises this morning.…”

By the time she’d convinced this Goth neighbor—Solange, or Sheila, the Celtic name she preferred to be called by—that she wasn’t out to kill Saj, five precious minutes had passed. But at least she could get some information, if Sheila had seen the Serb. “So you heard him. Did he speak? Have an accent?” she asked.

“I was rushing to work and heard loud noises. That’s all.”

Work, in the morning? Not some vampire party? Aimée blinked.

Sheila noticed her reaction. “Had to open my medieval shop on rue du Couédic early today for the confluence gathering. The tribes request it, you know,” she said, her high-pitched voice at odds with her appearance—black lace, tapestry-festooned apron, and matching black fingernails. She resembled a milkmaid from Hades.

“Then I found the door open, and no Saj. I’m worried.”

“Did you see who did this?”

“He ran away.”

Obviously.

“What did he look like?”

“Everything happened so fast.” She shrugged. “He took off through the courtyard.”

Aimée was stuffing several of Saj’s muslin drawstring pants and matching white shirts, an alpaca vest, and his mail in her bag. He wouldn’t be coming back here. Of that she’d make sure.

“Try to remember something about him. Anything strike you?”

“A hat, a cap? But he ran, I … didn’t see well.”

Great.

“We’re a community here, supporting the garden, keeping developers out.…” She sighed. “Hasn’t Saj told you? We’re the last bastion for artists and musicians, the way it used to be. The only thing that hasn’t changed is people living on the margins.” Another shrug.

This Goth liked to talk. Aimée wished her acute observations extended to this morning.

“The closer you get to the Périphérique, the cheaper,” she continued. “We’ve never had trouble even with the squatters who live by the garden. The single men, the day workers, they even respect the families.”

She painted a pretty picture, but the words dripping in red on Saj’s window belied the harmony.

“We’re a mix—old anarchists, poets, intellos, and film stars who like la vie de bohème without the prices closer to Montparno.”

Montparno, argot from an old Jean Gabin film.

“Violence and sick attacks like this just don’t happen here,” she said. “At least La Coalition is militant and rabid to stop the developers. Those bloodsuckers.”

La Coalition, those demonstrators who’d blocked rue d’Alésia.

“That so?” Aimée was half-listening, checking Saj’s computer—untouched—and finding the malware program. She scanned Saj’s tatami floor, the walls basic, white and untouched apart from the red letters on the window. “What about the Roma, the Gypsies on rue Raymond Losserand?” Many a time she’d seen women sitting on the street corner begging with a child in arms. Saj called it the shame of the quartier.

“From encampments beyond the Périphérique? Sad.” Sheila shook her head. “The bosses drive them here in vans, drop them on the corner to ‘work’ begging. The bosses take it all when they pick them up. Beat them when they don’t make their quota.”

Horrible.

Just then, she remembered Saj’s disgusting rabbit pellets, his stress busters. She found them by the window.

“Change the digicode.” Aimée gave her a card—no Leduc Detective logo, just her name and number. “Keep your eyes open and call if you see anything, okay?”

Halfway through the courtyard, she bent down to examine something yellow in the cobble crack. A damp bit of hay.

Sheila’s voice called from the upstairs window. “Maybe it’s nothing but … I remember he had a long coat on under his jacket.”

“Like a lab coat? Hospital worker?”

“Like that, but blue. And a blue cap.”

But where had the straw come from? The last farm in Paris battling the wrecking ball lay not far from here, on Tombe Issoire, sheltering squatters and artists. She almost grasped the connection, felt it bubbling up then eluding her.

Write it down, her father had always said, even if it appears random. Then connect the dots later. Boring, tedious, and the way the investigations got done. Tiny details contributed evidence in the most banal way. “That’s why we’re called poulets, chickens in the farmyard pecking for a crumb,” he’d say, “a seed sprouting into a detail.” “Non, Papa,” she’d reply, “you’re called poulets because the préfecture’s built on the ancient chicken market.” “True, ma princesse,” he’d say, “but we still peck for details. Details nail your perp, make your case. Nothing else.”

At her scooter, she jotted down notes, put the bit of straw in her pocket and Saj’s clothes in her helmet compartment. She dialed Saj.

“Please listen, Saj. You’re staying with me and Miles Davis for a while. No argument.”

“Has something happened to my place?”

“It’s not safe,” she said, feeling inadequate. “I’ve got you a change of clothes.”

A sigh. “I’ll stay at René’s. It’s closer and he’s got more equipment. He gave me the key. I should water his plants.”

“Bon. The alarm installed yet?”

“As we speak. Any good news?”

“Straw mean anything to you?”

“Not off the top of my head … a Serbian farm?”

“More later. Keep the door locked and alarmed.”

Suddenly she had a flash of realization. Stupid, why hadn’t she put this together before? Oleg mentioned a buyer, admitted Tatyana hired the Serb. Tatyana bragged to Yuri about her old schoolmate who had married to a Russian oligarch. What if the oligarch’s wife was the buyer? A slim shot, but right now the only one to pursue. Time to speak with Tatyana, the brains behind this, to call off the Serb.

By the time she pulled up on her scooter at Villa Leone, her bad feeling mounted. Beyond the passage’s Moorish arched gateway was a stretch of irregular cobblestones, geraniums and ivy trailing the walls of old wooden ateliers. A rustic, faded charm lingered on Villa Leone in a run-down nineteenth-century way—forgotten ateliers and wash hung out under the dripping vines.

On the corner, a Peugeot started up. Moments later Oleg rushed out and jumped in the passenger seat. With a grinding of gears, the Peugeot headed toward rue d’Alésia. The same blonde at the wheel of the same car Oleg drove off in last night. Evidently, Tatyana wore the babushka in the family.

Aimée followed, leaving two cars between them. At the stoplight, she squinted to see into the car. Two heads bobbing, hands waving. Oleg stepped out and slammed the door at the Plaisance Métro, scowling. Looked like an argument.

Aimée kept behind the Peugeot, zipping through the yellow lights to keep up. Not fifteen minutes later, they crossed the Pont de l’Alma, over the tunnel where Princess Diana’s Mercedes crashed, and past the heaps of fresh flowers brought daily in her memory. Tatyana veered into Avenue Montaigne, deep in the triangle d’or—the golden triangle, or luxe land, as Martine called it—the wedge of wealth bordered by the Champs-Elysées and the Seine, showcasing designer couture such as Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, Hermès. These days, no self-respecting, budget-minded, fashion-conscious French woman emptied her pocketbook on the avenue of haute couture, according to Martine, who knew these things. They left this province to the wives of sheikhs and foreign billionaires.

The Peugeot pulled into the Hôtel Plaza Athénée drive. She recognized the Plaza Athénée logo from the brochure in Oleg’s pocket. Red geraniums adorned the balconies, framed by stone art nouveau carvings. Expensive taste. Odds were Tatyana was visiting her old school friend and had disinvited Oleg.

Tatyana handed the keys to the valet and, with a swish of her long red leather coat, flounced past the bowing doorman. Too bad the hotel detective Aimée had known retired last Christmas. But he had always complained that this five-star hotel hadn’t upgraded their video surveillance. Or staff rooms. A tightwad for a manager, he said.

Aimée parked on a side street. She exchanged her ballet flats for heels, her helmet for the red wig she kept in the customized storage compartment under the seat installed by her cousin Sebastien. Minutes later, wearing oversize Dior sunglasses, her trenchcoat belt knotted, she smiled at the doorman.

The lobby exuded privilege: fresh sprays of white roses everywhere, gleaming marble floors, crystal chandeliers, and Louis XV chairs. From the adjoining bar she heard Russian conversation punctuated by peals of laughter. A woman wearing tight jeans, open-toed snakeskin stilettos, and an enormous bored pout passed Aimée in a cloud of amber perfume. She held a cell phone in each hand. All she lacked was an entourage. This diva made even the mauve Givenchy she wore look tacky. Tatyana, sitting in this group of three women, leaned forward laughing and hanging on the diva’s every word.

The third member, a sleek-haired brunette in a black pantsuit, scanned the bar and checked her cell phone every few minutes. A personal assistant, a trainer? Aimée hedged her bets on a bodyguard.

The diva nudged the bodyguard, who snapped her fingers at the waiter.

Aimée moved closer to hear. The bodyguard pointed to a menu. “Da, oui, please to order from the dog menu. Steak haché for Pinky. But first, please to take him for walk.”

The diva deposited a Chihuahua with an eighteen-karat-gold collar into the hands of the black-vested waiter. Not an unusual task in his job, judging by his servile expression.

“À votre service,” said the waiter, smiling at the little rat of a canine.

Aimée hoped the diva tipped well. The waiter deserved it. But the rich were different, n’est-ce pas?

The diva and Tatyana clinked frosted cocktail glasses together. Designer bags bunched beside them. The new Russia.

Aimée was dying to know what they were saying.

Instead of moaning that she hadn’t taken Russian at the lycée like Martine had, she sat within earshot by the walk-in-sized butterscotch stone fireplace. Tried to figure out a plan.

“Madame Bereskova, une petite signature, s’il vous plaît,” said another waiter, depositing a moisture-beaded bottle of Taittinger in the ice bucket.

The diva signed the bill with a flourish.

“Has Madame’s husband’s driver returned?” said the bodyguard.

“I’ll check, Madame.” The first waiter bowed out with Pinky under his arm.

“Our tour guide should arrive any moment. Please to ask her to join us.”

Aimée had an idea. She pulled out her wallet, chose a card, then stood up.

In the lobby, by a potted palm, stood a young woman with a cell phone to her ear and a badge that read DISCRIMINATING TOURS.

“Mademoiselle Vanya?” Aimée said, reading her badge.

The young woman smiled and clicked off her phone. “You’re Madame Bereskova’s assistant I spoke with?”

She hesitated to get the woman in trouble. Thought fast. “May I speak with you in private?”

“Is there a problem?” Her eyes were unsure. “Where’s the Russian woman who arranged the tour?”

Aimée took her elbow. Guided her behind a pillar. “Change of plans. You’ve taken ill. Food poisoning. Instead of canceling, you’re sending in a replacement. Okay?”

Mademoiselle Vanya’s jaw dropped.

“Nod if you understand, Mademoiselle.”

“I don’t understand. That’s my job.”

Aimée scanned the lobby.

“Who are you?” the young woman asked.

“I’m with Monsieur Bereskova’s Paris security. Reports have alerted us to a threat. I’m to take over. He wishes me not to alarm Madame Bereskova. Compris?”

Aimée saw the questions spinning in the woman’s mind. One was if she’d get paid for her time. Another was whether to believe Aimée or not.

“Not to alarm you, but it’s imperative you cooperate,” Aimée said, flashing the generic security badge she kept for emergencies. “The firm will take care of your fee, of course. Now make the call. Sound convincing and here’s an extra hundred francs.”

“Forget trying to bribe me,” she said. Her jaw stuck out, a defiant look in her eyes. “I’m calling my boss.”

Great.

“Then you’re trained to deal with kidnap attempts? Trained to disarm les explosifs? Handle armed combat and martial arts?”

“But her husband arranged for lunch at the Ritz, a bilingual afternoon cultural tour, some sights—”

“Someone slipped up. You should have been told,” Aimée interrupted, pointing to the one video camera in the ceiling woodwork. “We’re private security hired to guard his wife.”

“You?”

The woman needed more convincing and Aimée needed to hurry. Time for the matter-of-fact approach she’d gleaned from Chirac’s security detail.

“As a woman, I blend in, people assume I’m a personal assistant,” she said. “Bien sûr, I’m trained in firearms, protective driving, countersurveillance, and bomb search. But it’s about being able to read a situation, identify threats—whether it’s the paparazzi, a kidnapper, or an assassin—and get my client to safety. If it comes down to conflict, I’ve failed my client and myself. We like to defuse potential threats before they become issues.”

Aimée pulled out her phone. Pretended to consult it.

“I suggest you cooperate before it’s too late. The doorman, if you didn’t notice, is one of ours.”

She pointed to the uniformed doorman speaking into a headset. De rigueur in five-star hotels these days. She counted on the tour guide not to know that.

“Easy to say. How do I know you’re a bodyguard, not a kidnapper?”

Smart.

“That’s going to have to be your call, isn’t it?” Aimée rolled her eyes. “At this moment we have a situation. A level-three threat.” She continued making it up as she went on. “Wives of Russian businessmen make prime targets these days. Serbians pick them off like candy.”

Horror filled the young woman’s eyes.

“I’d prefer not to make a scene, but either make that call or—”

“Make it two hundred francs more worth my while,” she interrupted.

Aimée cringed, hoping it would be worth it.

In return the woman handed Aimée her tour guide pin. Pulled out her phone and hit speed dial. “Mademoiselle.…” followed by several phrases in hurried Russian. “Dosvedanya.”

She pocketed the money and disappeared without a backward glance. Aimée waited ten minutes, using it to read Le Parisien’s business section, which she scanned until she found an article on the Russian oligarch business deals at the air trade show. The diva’s hubby, Bereskova, was a major player. It seemed the oligarch’s search for composite carbon parts necessary for plane fuselages had hit snags with the Ministry of Defense.

Putting aside the flea market antiquaire, Tatyana stood to gain from the Modigliani—a guaranteed entrée for a babushka girl from the village to ride with the nouveau riche of Moscow.

Tatyana would keep contact with the Serb’s cohort, needing him to make good on the deal. Find the painting.

Aimée would have to get Tatyana aside, threaten her cover if she didn’t call the dog off.

Russian oligarchs belonged to the select economic strata with enough disposable income for a Modigliani. Hadn’t Marcel just pointed out the limos of the Russian oligarchs’ wives—boutiquing while their husbands shopped for an air fleet? A Modigliani would be a plum treasure for a Russian collector.

She prayed she could pull this off. In the marble restroom scented by floating gardenias in a matching marble fountain, she used a gold-braided linen hand towel. Touched up her eyes à la ELLE, smoky shadows to smolder.

Smiling with an apologetic shrug, Aimée introduced herself to the women. “Your guide took ill,” she said, re-explaining the situation.

Tatyana and the bodyguard looked her up and down. Did Tatyana’s gaze linger a second longer before turning to the diva?

“The boring Ritz and some cultural tour?” The diva laughed. “No way.”

Aimée’s heart sank. Thought fast on how she could use this. “Actually, the tour company suggested me because I conduct shopping tours also. I’m collaborating with my journalist friend on her book—Chic Pas Cher—a fashion guide to what Parisians wear. We’re doing a spread in ELLE.”

That much was almost true.

“ELLE?” The diva sat up. “Vogue’s my, how you say, bible.”

Aimée beamed her a smile. “But ELLE’s au courant for the young set like you.”

The diva ate that up—Aimée could tell—cocking an eyebrow at Tatyana, who grinned back like a lapdog. “I like this idea. We go shopping. You take us to where Parisiennes go.”

“Hermès, Vuitton, you mean?” Aimée asked.

“Nyet. Like you. You do good job, get good tip.”

In the Mercedes limo, the chauffeur tipped his blue cap. Large shoulders, Slavic cheekbones, and an accent. “The Ritz first, Madame Bereskova?”

The diva leaned back in the seat and pointed at Aimée. “Change plans. Tell him.”

Tatyana and the diva drank champagne from the bar in the back. The bodyguard, Svetla, poured and checked her cell phone. The women weren’t much for small talk with the help. Aimée racked her brain for a way to engage them, turn the conversation to the painting somehow. But the diva, not one for culture, flashed francs like Métro tickets. The chauffeur, stocky and phlegmatic, interested her. Even more when she noticed the bulge under his jacket. The oligarch kept his wife protected. She doubted the chauffeur had a license for that.

“You with the KGB?” she winked.

“We don’t call it that anymore. It’s the FSB,” he said. “Retired.”

Great. His thin mouth set and he ignored her further attempts at conversation.

But he couldn’t guard the diva in the changing room. Aimée hadn’t thought this through, as usual, but she’d seize whatever opportunity she could. Doubted she could keep the charade up too long; the guide might have second thoughts and check with her boss. She flicked on the tape recorder in her bag.

The glass partition of the limo closed. Bad news. She had to bide her time until she got Tatyana alone. She directed the chauffeur to agnès b., then Lolita Lempicka, for starters.

Aimée steered the diva away from a strapless teal wide-legged jumpsuit, and the flamenco-inspired tie shrug. Guided her to a bronze metal-mesh tunic, helped her accessorize with a tasseled clutch and T-strap heels.

Tatyana stuck to the diva like glue, even in the dressing room. Two shops and several thousand francs later, Aimée understood none of what they said.

While the diva was in the dressing room, Aimée stepped outside and called Marevna, the translator. Busy.

“You are holding out,” said the diva, her voice shrill, when they were back in the limo. “We want fashion must-haves for the Parisienne. Why we not find more accessories?”

Aimée cringed inside but smiled. “Excellent point. I can’t fool you. But you must understand, a Parisienne builds a seasonal wardrobe. Invests in certain basics, the foundation—” What had Martine said? “A good bag, coat, or jacket and heels. Then it’s simple to mix and match.”

“Teach us accessorize,” she said, accompanied by a burp.

The back of the limo filled with hoots of laughter.

The girls were out for a good time. How could she turn it around? Only a car seat away from Tatyana, who appeared to be having the time of her life. The champagne flowed. Meanwhile, Aimée’s twenty-four hours were ticking away.

Had she gone up the wrong allée? She’d assumed the diva negotiated with Tatyana for the Modigliani. Time to push.

“Fashion’s an art, you know. Style takes thought.” Aimée pretended to think. “Think of building the perfect outfit as an artistic process. One must visualize the background, shade it with a working color scheme, accessorize to heighten the mood. Evoke a feeling. Think of a great painting. A Modigliani.”

Tatyana’s mascaraed eyes narrowed. Had Aimée gone too far? Had Tatyana finally recognized her?

The diva was speaking into her cellphone in loud Russian. Apparently someone on the other end was chewing her out.

“Da, Dmitri.” She clicked off and her fuchsia mouth sagged in disappointment. “Must go Ritz hotel.”

“But you booked the afternoon,” Aimée said, trying to keep calm. “We haven’t even hit Louboutin. His must-have red-soled heels.”

The diva sighed. “For one time I having fun. With French woman, like friend, see real Paris. Not stupid boring Ritz. Meetings, always business.” A bitter laugh. “My husband Dmitri book me.”

Dimitri kept his diva on a tight leash. For a moment Aimée felt sorry for her. How sad, if she really regarded Aimée as a friend.

“Your husband appreciates art?”

The diva snorted. “Dmitri buys culture. Like everything else. Now he buys museum.”

Like Oleg had said.

“Pay her.” The diva nodded to her bodyguard as the limo pulled up at the Ritz. But Aimée hadn’t even talked to Tatyana, had learned nothing. She couldn’t let her get away.

A wad of francs were thrust in Aimée’s hand as she emerged. “Keep extra. It’s your tip.” The diva and Tatyana disappeared under the portico.

Holding in her anguish, Aimée smiled at the bodyguard. “That’s too kind. But I’d like to give her my card. You know, for a more detailed tour.”

“I handle that.”

“Of course, please do.…” She played it another way. “I love the ladies’ room here. They wouldn’t mind if I used it, non?”

The bodyguard leaned closer, placing her dry hands on Aimée’s … a fraction too long. Her scent of leather and champagne filled Aimée’s nose.

No mistaking that body language.

“You like women?” A definite come-on. Aimée wanted to crawl back into the limo and speed away. But it wasn’t her limo and it wouldn’t speed away.

Aimée nodded. “And men.”

“Bi, me too. Why frown on pleasure? A drink later, yes? I’m off tonight.”

Aimée had never been propositioned by a female Russian bodyguard before. Always a first time.

“Give me your number.” Aimée took Svetla’s cell phone and replaced it with hers before Svetla could object. “We’ll key each other’s number in. French numbers are so difficult.” As she keyed in a number that went to an answering service, she casually nudged her bag with her elbow so it landed on Svetla’s foot. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

As Svetla reached down, Aimée scrolled to the last three numbers dialed—all the same. Before she could memorize the number, Svetla palmed her phone. Shot her a look. “Tonight.”

By the time Aimée entered the lobby, there was no trace of Tatyana or the diva. Conversations buzzed from huddled groups of men in dark suits, blue shirts, and red ties—the Ministry uniform. Definitely something high-powered going on. A hovering man, obviously a plainclothes hotel detective, had glided toward her.

“May I help you?”

Get lost, she wanted to say.

“Madame Bereskova forgot something in the limo,” she said.

“I’ll make sure Madame gets it,” he said, blocking her way by the Hemingway Bar sign.

She brushed past him, flashing her father’s old police ID with her photo on it. The only way with minions like this.

Hurrying down the long, plush carpeted corridor, she heard a hiss. A snap of fingers. “You! Here!”

Tatyana, her eyes narrowed in anger, gestured at her from an alcove. Her long, red fingernails stabbed the air.

“What do you want, spy?”

“Simple,” Aimée said. “Call the Serb off.”

Tatyana’s mascaraed eyes crinkled. “Like I know what you mean? Get lost or I call—”

“Dmitri? I’d like to meet him.”

Tatyana’s thick foundation creased in a network of fine lines. Not as young as Aimée thought. Or else the woman had had a hard life.

“Maybe you want him and the flics to know you hired—?”

“Shhh.” Tatyana gestured to ladies’ restroom. “In here.”

Tatyana checked the cubicles, the closet with extra hand towels and soap, the dish with coins for the attendant. Empty. “I make it quick before the pipi lady come back,” she said, arranging her sleek blonde bob. “Quit hounding my husband.”

“Oleg called me.”

“I mean following us around, like yesterday and today,” Tatyana said.

Yesterday? “You’re paranoid, Tatyana. Give me the Serb’s number. The contact.”

“What do I know?” She shrugged. “It’s his brother. He’s pissed, out of my control. Right now you want a cut. Fine. Ten percent.”

“Quit haggling,” Aimée said. “Bereskova’s your buyer, right?”

“He has museum.” Tatyana pouted.

“He’s a Lenin stalwart, or an art connoisseur?”

“What he knows about art fits in my toenail. Maybe the babushkas in his orphanage idolized Lenin.”

“What does that mean?”

Tatyana’s eyes glinted. “Fifteen percent?”

Aimée tried another angle. “Why is your diva friend unhappy?”

“So much money and still unhappy. I don’t know.”

“Quit the act, Tatyana. Cooperate or—”

“Dmitri not big oligarch now. More like a gardener,” Tatyana said, glancing at her watch. A white Chanel. A gift from the diva or an imitation, Aimée couldn’t tell. “He needs art, this museum.”

“A gardener?”

“Dmitri plants seeds, adds fertilizer, water, like that.”

“I don’t understand.” She wished Tatyana made more sense.

“Dmitri grows connections, like you say. Needs to make himself legitimate again. Now he have so many little projects, all seeds he’s trying to plant to grow into something big, put him back on top. Museum is one seed.”

Then it fit together. Dmitri was the buyer.

“So Dmitri wants the Modigliani to legitimize his museum and gain connections?”

“Who knows? But he owes krysha, we call it in my country—it’s how you do business.”

“Krysha?”

“Protection and patronage.” Looking bored, Tatyana smoothed back an eyebrow in the mirror. “Maybe Lenin means something to him.” A short laugh. “Dmitri comes from nothing. He was raised in a collective orphanage. Worked at a factory all the way up the apparatchik ladder. A self-made man. But last year he backed the wrong—how you say—Eurocrat? I give him credit. He wants to be back at the top.”

Aimée’s surprise must have shown on her face.

A bitter laugh. “No secret. The price of doing business. That’s Moscow rules. Honor krysha if you want to stay alive.”

“So you furnish the Modigliani and he owes you, non?”

Tatyana’s cell phone rang. She checked the number. “I must go. He’s pressuring me.” Her tone went serious. “I need the painting. We make it work for everyone.”

Aimée blocked the door. “The Serb threatened my partner. You’re not leaving until I find him.”

Tatyana hesitated, considering. “Avenue Claude Vellefaux, a café-bar by the hospital. That’s all I know.” Her eyes narrowed. “All right, twenty percent. But furnish it tonight.”

“TATYANA GAVE UP the info too easily,” Aimée said.

Back at Leduc Detective, she’d finished her account and a bottle of fizzy Badoit after handing Saj his clothes and malware program. The office was filled with the scent of sage still smoldering in the incense bowl—Saj’s ritual of purification and cleansing of auras. After last night, she agreed to it. Aimée flicked her lighter and lit another bundled stick of sage, wishing she were lighting a cigarette instead.

“She sounds desperate if she offered you twenty percent,” Saj said, sitting on his tatami mat, a program running on his screen. “Or she’s playing the oligarch. On the other hand, he could be playing her, too.”

“You mean he’s got his own feelers out?”

Saj shrugged, then winced. “Aimée, tell the flics. That one from the art squad who liked you so much. The one who wants to set you up for a buy.”

Dombasle. The one with the nice eyes. “He wants a patsy.” Part of her wanted to confide in Dombasle, get his advice, but the other part knew she had to handle this alone. Finding the painting would lead to her mother. But first she had to neutralize the Serb.

And the hours were ticking away, her deadline looming. A tingling sensation ran up her arm.

“But tell him what? That I ran away after I found Yuri tortured, and took the art dealer’s photo before he was pushed on the Métro tracks?” She shook her head. Reached in her desk drawer and shuffled the reports until she found her mascara and kohl eyeliner. She needed a quick touch-up. “Alors, the Serb’s brother made a fool of police security at Hôtel-Dieu, threatened you, who they regard in their own twisted logic as a suspect.” She stood, headed to the back armoire. “I need to neutralize the Serb, and not in this outfit.”

Behind the plumber’s overalls, nurse’s uniform, and other disguises in her armoire, she found jeans, a vintage charcoal Sonia Rykiel cashmere tunic, and a black chrome metallic jacket.

“Slow down, Aimée,” Saj said. “Don’t go this alone. Or run off half-cocked without a plan.”

“Good point. I’ll bring my bag of tricks.”

“Act tough, then. Don’t say I—”

“Didn’t warn me? This mec’s ruthless—you’re injured, and what if you’d been home alone? He’s carrying out a vendetta. Until he learns you didn’t kill his thief of a brother, he won’t stop.”

“You don’t have to prove that to me. Or that you’re brave.”

Brave? The last thing she felt. “Look, my mother’s involved and I need you safe.”

And then she remembered. “Where’s Maxence? Don’t tell me he’s playing hooky already?”

“Been and gone to René’s for the cables I need. You need me working.” She heard the smile in Saj’s voice. “Someone has to be beside this kid. He’s good, Aimée.” Suddenly he looked a little bleak. “But don’t forget, boss, I need you.”

“Still hurts, Saj?”

He nodded. Winced. “What can I do from here? How can I help?”

She thought. “Find out what you can about this Bereskova. His business, the museum. Tatyana intimated it’s a front.”

“Odd, non, that she’s so up-front on that score?” Saj said.

“That struck me, too.” She pulled out her map and located Avenue Claude Vellefaux near the hospital where Serge gave pathology seminars. Why hadn’t she heard the lab results from him? She tried his number again; his phone went to voice mail.

At the office door she paused. “What’s our alarm code disarmer?”

“Hare krishna hare krishna.”

“A Hindu mantra?” She’d learned that much from Saj. “Feels like sacrilege or something.”

“Krishna won’t mind. Means we’ll chant several times a day.”

HER SCOOTER IDLED at the red light on Canal Saint-Martin. Irritated, she pulled on her gloves, watching the locks move the water slowly under the arched bridge. Like everything else today. Slow.

A barge made its way into the water, filling the basin with shushing ripples as a small heron winged its way over the bank.

She found the café across from the peeling stuccoed walls of Hôpital Saint-Louis, built in the seventeenth century to contain plague victims. The area still felt isolated. She noticed the young drug dealers on the corner of nearby rue Jean Moinon and a Chinese hooker emerging from a car, two blocks down from the hooker turf on rue de Belleville. Edgy and mixed.

The Serb mafia café fit right in. Soccer team pennants on the nicotine-stained walls, mismatched chairs at gouged wooden tables. The turn-of-the-century frosted-glass windows were fogged with smoke.

The clientele matched the decor. Several large-shouldered men, bouncer material, wore tracksuits and huddled over beer and dice at the half-zinc, half-Formica counter.

A shame to ruin the counter like that, she thought. And a bigger shame to see no espresso machine.

“Badoit, s’il vous plaît,” she said to the man behind the counter. He looked up from the dice, revealing a craggy, pitted face and dark-knit brows. He was the size of a truck.

“No Badoit.”

“Bon, something sparkling, as in water.”

He popped the bottle top of a Knjaz Miloš.

“Nice label.”

“From Serbia, my country,” he said, as if challenging her.

“Bon.” She smiled, took a sip. Mineral-tasting fizz trickled down her throat. “We’re off to a good start, you sharing with me and all.”

“Eh?” His brows knit closer together.

One of the mecs jerked their thumb at him. “You raise or not?”

He inclined his big head with the barest of nods. If she hadn’t been watching him closely, she wouldn’t have noticed. She realized this crew communicated in subtle ways.

They’d sussed her out from the moment she walked in. At least no one had raised a gun. But she doubted the bulges in the waistbands of their jogging pants held packs of facial tissue.

“No need to waste time, eh? Tatyana.…”

“Who?”

Like he didn’t know.

“Russian, blonde.” That sounded generic. She racked her brain. “Sports a white Chanel watch—a client who referred me.” Also lame. She took a breath. “I have a job for Feliks’s brother.”

She saw no reaction on his face.

“Job? You’re in a café. My café. Go to the labor exchange.”

“I mean a job for a specialist.”

A smile spread over his jowls. An ugly smile that didn’t reach his dull eyes.

“Construction, you mean—removals, concrete work. I refer you. But plumbers, you get Polish in their own their café, or the soup kitchen outside Notre Dame de l’Assomption church.”

“Not that kind of work.” He’d make it hard. He didn’t trust her. She felt the others looking at her. Better to leave a card and then … what? Hope word would trickle down and the Serb’s brother would call her?

Her cell phone rang.

“Aimée, you’ve got to see this.” Serge’s excited voice on the other end.

See what? She turned away from the counter. “Can’t you just tell me, Serge?”

“I asked the lab to expedite a broader screening using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry.”

She looked back and noticed the men throwing dice. One had his eye on her.

She lowered her voice. “So you found the cause of death?”

“It took a lot of doing,” Serge said. “Let me tell you. This screen shows what peaks pop up, then we did a quantitative assay, looking at the peaks the compound fell in. Fascinating.”

She turned away again, wishing he’d cut to the chase. “Say it so I understand it, Serge.”

“Xylazine. An injectable horse tranquilizer. Not a high dosage, but the victim suffered an allergic reaction to it.”

“Like anaphylactic shock?”

“Similar. His body shut down within minutes. But not before he’d gotten a few steps.”

“So he staggered from Yuri’s atelier.…” That fit. “And you think …?”

“The lab tech’s seen it before,” he said. “For a home invasion the thief takes precautions. In this case, a syringe of horse tranquilizer to neutralize the occupants if they wake up or return home unexpected. Not a lethal dose, but enough to knock them out and give him time to clean out the house.” Serge paused. “In this Serb, a portion of his bruising happened before death. I conclude he got interrupted, fought with someone, and stabbed himself by mistake.”

“By mistake?”

“A small needle puncture in his derrière. Aligning with the back pocket of his jeans.”

He’d killed himself.

“Brilliant.” Her mind spun. “But where’s the syringe?”

“Check the crime scene report,” Serge said.

She thought back. It might be in the bushes, in the gutter where he got caught between the cars, or it might even have fallen in the atelier that night and washed away in the detritus of Yuri’s overflowing sink.

On some report she’d find it. But what she needed most was the lab report to prove this to the Serb’s brother. Suddenly, one more thing made sense. She reached in her jacket pocket for the straw she’d found at Saj’s, thought of the matching straw twined in Yuri’s trampled rosemary, and the barnyard smell Nora mentioned. “Where would he obtain this … what’s it called?”

“Xylazine? Around horses.”

“Meet me in ten minutes,” she said.

She turned to the man behind the counter. Smiled. “I’m looking for the mec who works with horses,” she said. “There’s money in it.”

He pointed to the door. “Drink’s on me. Go back the way you came in, Mademoiselle.”

She ground her teeth. Wondered what the going rate for a hit ran to today. Took a guess.

“Five thousand francs’ worth.”

He pounded his fist. “For the long-haired freak who ran over his brother?” Shook his head. “You think money buys his brother back, stupid French bitch?”

Her spine stiffened. She’d hit a nerve. The men in back advanced further up the bar, crowding her. Their heads down. Like a pack of hounds waiting for the hunt master’s command. Her damp shirt stuck in between her shoulder blades.

“Never,” she said, hoping her voice wouldn’t break. “But it would get him payback and help me at the same time.”

A snort. “What the hell …?”

“Let’s call it two in one. I’d like him to take care of that mec who took care of his brother, compris?”

One of the men looked up.

“No love lost on my end,” she said. “I’m willing to pay.”

Another one cleared his throat. She saw a bare nod of his head. The mec caught his look. For whatever reason, they had decided to trust her.

“Why didn’t you say so?” he said. “Bois de Vincennes stables, the Hippodrome.”

“His name?”

“Goran.”

“I’ll tell him you’re coming,” he said. “Better have his cash ready.”

AIMÉE MET SERGE in the back lot of the morgue, the elevated Métro clanking above their heads. The Seine flowed darkly to their right.

“You copied the report, right?”

Serge made a long face. “And no one will ever know. Promise me, Aimée.” Serge looked around in the lot as if the authorities would swoop down any minute. Only a man wearing white boots hosing down a loading bay. Aimée didn’t like to think what went down the drain.

“You’ve got my word,” she said,

“And you’ve got the twins for next weekend,” Serge said.

She cringed inside. Hyperkinetic three-year-olds? She’d have to take them to Sebastien’s wedding. They could be … what, flower boys? Ring bearers? She’d beg her cousin. Better yet, she’d let Saj teach them computer games. Serge’s wife never let them near a computer.

“Bien sûr.” She smiled.

A STABLE HAND in blue jeans poured water in a horse trough in the clear afternoon light. Flies buzzed; fragrant piles of manure steamed in the cold air. Aimée stepped around a bale of hay and jumped as she sent a nest of mice scurrying.

“Lost, Mademoiselle?” said a man in overalls topped by a three-quarter-length blue work coat. He had a pronounced Eastern European accent. “Public’s not allowed in the stalls.”

“But I’m looking for you, Goran,” she said. “Your friends called, non?”

Goran straightened up. She saw piercing black eyes in a weathered face, a mustache, and thick brown hair graying at the temples. A face aged before his time, she thought.

“You’re the one, eh?” He gestured to a back stall. “Make it good. I’m working.”

She shook her head. No way in hell she’d let him box her in a rodent-infested stall.

Goran eyed the groom. “I’ll deal with this and join you in the exercise ring,” he said, gesturing the other man out. The stable door clanged behind him. Uneasy, Aimée breathed in the horse smells, took in the old wooden enclosure and the high, dark ceiling.

“Tatyana owes me and you’re going to—”

“Show you the proof Feliks died by his own hand,” Aimée interrupted. “His autopsy reports the cause of death is heart failure due to Xylazine. He injected it by mistake.”

Goran slammed the half-door on a whinnying horse. “Liar.”

“I thought you’d say that. Read it yourself,” she said. “The same Xylazine you use to tranquilize horses here.”

He pulled a bandanna from his overalls pocket, wiped his neck. “I know what it does.”

“Of course you do,” she said. “You stole it from the veterinary cabinet and furnished it to your brother for his job. A simple snatch-and-grab that went wrong.”

“Xylazine doesn’t kill humans,” Goran said, his eyes hard and narrowed. “What’s all this to you anyway?”

“Given a high dosage, it could. But you only gave Feliks enough to sedate the old man if needed.”

“That freak killed my brother. Ran him down. I’ll take care of him for you—a pleasure.”

“Feliks died before he hit the windshield. Read the autopsy.”

He looked up in alarm. “Who are you?”

“I was in the car, Goran. Your brother didn’t bleed; his heart had stopped pumping.”

“Bitch. It was you.” He rushed at her. Only stopped when he saw her Beretta leveled at his kneecaps.

“Feliks suffered an allergic reaction to the Xylazine,” she said, her heart pounding. “He died a few, maybe four, minutes after accidentally injecting himself.”

“What?”

“It’s all here.”

“But I’m a veterinarian.”

“So you say,” she said.

“In Serbia I’m qualified, but—”

“Here you contributed to your brother’s robbery jobs.”

He stepped back. “Feliks was small-time. Go after the big players in the suburbs with Kalashnikovs.”

Lay the blame on someone else.

“Feliks’s body was covered with prison tattoos. He’s Serb mafia, like your friends at the café.”

A muscle in Goran’s cheek twitched. “Ever walked on the wrong side of the street in Zagreb?” His voice rose. “Or get thrown into a cell with warlords—the mafia? You don’t get out alive unless you join. We escaped, our family didn’t.” His lip trembled. “You wouldn’t know what it’s like to sleep on the street, on the floor of a café if we were lucky. No job. Feliks met up with former soldiers here. I told him to stay away from them.” He sighed. “But he saw me, a qualified doctor teaching veterinary courses at the university, shoveling horse shit.”

“Don’t look for pity from me,” she said. “Trying to attack my friend at the hospital, threatening him and defacing his home. What medical code of ethics do you follow? Injecting horse tranquilizer, taking a hit job for revenge and money?”

“Think I earn enough to bury my little brother?” His shoulders slumped. “I owe the café owner, we slept there.…”

Aimée’s neck went hot. She hoped to God they wouldn’t appear. But they’d smelled money.

“He’s all I had left. But that freak—”

“The injection killed him, Goran.” She thrust the autopsy into his shaking hands.

“Non, non.…” A low wail welled up from him. Then a searing animal-like cry of pain. Horses kicked the stall, whinnied. His cry raked her skin raw.

“What’s going on?” A veterinarian in a lab coat rushed into the stable, followed by the groom. “Goran, what’s wrong? You’re hurt?”

The veterinarian leaned down and noticed the autopsy in the hay. “What’s this?”

Should she let the vet read it? Goran would be fired. Arrested. Then she’d learn nothing from him.

And she could tell—from his sweating brow, the nervous toe movement of his boots—he knew something.

Before the vet could reach for the report, Aimée picked it up. “Bad news, I’m afraid. His brother.…” She let her voice trail off.

Goran crumpled against the wooden stall, destroyed. Despite everything, she pitied him.

“I’m with the Red Cross, doctor,” she said. “May I speak with him alone?”

“Use the tack room. Jacky, get some water,” he said.

Five minutes later, Goran was slumped on a chair by hanging bridles and horse brushes. A dazed look on his face. “I killed him.”

“Take a sip.” She handed him the water. “Now shut up and listen. I didn’t turn you in, but you need to help me, understand?”

“Why?”

She thought of Yuri’s saying about the Serbs—an unlucky man would drown in a teacup.

“Your plan went wrong and you’re devastated. But you’re going to call the café and tell them the hit’s off. Go to Chantilly, where there are plenty of horses, and work there. Start fresh.”

He looked up. “Why would you do that? I killed my brother.”

“Then prison appeals to you?” she said. “Tonight the flics will question every stable in Paris and within a twenty-five kilometer radius.”

His eyes bulged in fear.

“Accessory to murder and theft. Prison, deportation.”

“Deport me back to Serbia?” The reality hit him.

“Or did I get it wrong—you returned the next morning and tortured the old man?”

“Me, why? What’s the old man to me?”

Or had he attacked her in her office? But Goran spoke with a thick Serbian accent, unlike the voice over the speakerphone. She looked at his hands. Slim palms; thin, tapered fingers—not like the meaty paws that had grabbed the roots of her hair. Her scalp tingled.

“So convince me, Goran. Start talking.” She kept her eyes locked on his. “Like I said, you can start over. In return for my not turning you in, you tell me everything—how you met Tatyana, Feliks’s role—each detail.”

“I don’t know. Feliks worked alone. He wanted it that way.”

“Lie to me and I turn you in,” she said, pulling out her cell phone. “Tell your café friends you’ll meet them later. Make the call.”

He nodded, punched in a number. Mumbled something in Serbian. Clicked off.

“You were on Villa d’Alésia the night of the robbery, weren’t you?”

A shrug. “Feliks didn’t want me involved,” he said.

Aimée thought back to the police report Serge had shown her in the morgue. The contents of the Serb’s stomach.

“But Feliks ordered a kebob takeout from rue d’Alésia. The receipt was in his pocket.” She took a guess. “You shared it, didn’t you? Lie to me again and the deal’s off.”

Goran hung his head. Nodded. “He was so blasé. I worried about him. The danger. But he kept saying.…”

Blasé? “Just a routine job, non?” she said. “He’d done this a lot.”

Goran’s shoulders sagged again. “He shouldn’t have been a criminal. Feliks was such a gentle boy when we were children. He changed after Pristina. The massacre in the town square, the roundups in the hills … our family thrown in a pit.”

Pain creased his brow.

“You waited behind the old man’s house by the wall in the rosemary bushes, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “I worried for him.”

“But Feliks didn’t come out the back like you thought, right, Goran?”

He looked up. In his lined face, his eyes brimmed with tears. “I heard sirens.”

“Did you see a white van?”

“A white van?”

“Think back. Which way did you run?”

“I went through the park by the wall. Then toward the Métro … non, I waited in the park.”

Aimée nodded. A queasiness rumbled in her stomach. Residue of last night’s drug, she thought, but the horses pawing in their stalls, the manure, the leather tang of the saddles didn’t help. She wanted something to settle her stomach, but she couldn’t stop. This went somewhere. She needed to keep pressing him.

She sat down cross-legged on the earthen floor, took a deep breath. Then shoved aside the hay, brushing away the mouse droppings with her boot. With her finger she drew a square and lines in the dirt. “Goran, think of this as a map. Here’s the park, here’s the wall behind Yuri’s.”

“Yuri?”

“The old man Feliks attempted to rob. But the painting had been stolen.”

“Phfft,” Goran expelled air in disgust. “Painting, jewelry? I don’t ask. All I know is this Tatyana contracted Feliks for a job. Never paid him, you understand. Now she owes me. A job is a job.”

His words echoed what Oleg had told her. She drew a circle. “See, here’s the old townhouse with shutters. Show me where you were.”

Goran stared. Then pointed. “Here, maybe there. I kept walking in the bushes trying to find somewhere to climb over the wall. So dark, and every place was so high.” He blinked, shook his head. “I couldn’t get out.”

“You remember something, don’t you?”

He put his finger in the dirt. Scratched an X.

“In the park I hid below the wall here. Looked for a rock, a tree. I saw a van drive by two, three times. That’s right,” he said, almost to himself. “Like it was circling the block.”

Aimée started to nod, but every time she moved her head queasiness rose from her stomach. She kept still, willed it down.

“You noticed because you were looking out for your brother,” she said. “You watched out for the flics.”

“At first I thought it was the police,” he said, his finger hitting the dirt. “But no blue light, no blue letters.”

The pieces fit together. The person who fought the Serb—a member of Luebet’s gang? Now it seemed everyone who knew of the Modigliani had tried to steal it.

“Where did the van go?”

“It pulled over, waited.…”

“How long?”

“The driver got out.… Wait, I remember, I heard metal noises. He was doing something on the back of the van.”

Aimée remembered the white van shooting out in front of them, Saj downshifting and honking the horn.

“I don’t know after that,” Goran said.

What was she missing here? “So you left? Took the Métro?”

“I waited maybe ten, fifteen minutes. Climbed the fence, then I walked. Along here.” He trailed his finger in the dirt along rue de Châtillon.

“What did you see? People, lights?”

He closed his eyes, thinking. “Some lights in windows, a small factory, but no one saw me. I avoided the Métro.”

“Where did you head?”

“Tombe Issoire, a place full of squatters. I was supposed to meet Feliks there, but he never came.”

“But where was Feliks supposed to hand off the painting to Tatyana?”

“He wouldn’t tell me.”

Aimée believed him.

“Did you see the van again?” she said. “You were nervous, non? Had an eye out for white police vans.”

He shook his head. “I kept my head down. Walked fast.”

One last try. “The van. Think again. You said it parked here on rue de Châtillon by the park. Then it drove on. Anything strike you? The lettering on it, the model or make, scratches or dents, old or new?”

“Was that who hurt Feliks?”

He’d registered the bruise marks from the autopsy.

“Someone beat him to the painting,” she said. “Try to remember. Could the van have been a rental?”

He nodded. “Maybe. Maybe like those ones that service Orly.”

Excited, she leaned forward. “A service van for catering, or packages like express post, or baggage handling?”

His brow furrowed. “Now that I think back, like those. Just white, square, wedge back … a Renault? Too hard to see through the bushes.”

Like every other Renault van in Paris. But she made one more attempt. “I know it was dark, but try to think. An older model, even a partial license plate?”

“You’re joking.” He paused. Thinking. “Non, like new.”

She nodded. “Go on.”

“It had, like, you know, a temporary license until new plates come.”

An itching feeling told Aimée he knew more. “But you haven’t told me everything, have you, Goran?”

The smell of his fear and sweat mingled with the dust.

“I’m giving you a chance, a way to start over. Quit holding out,” she said. “Feliks failed to show that night, so you returned in the morning, non? To find out what happened.”

“What difference does it make? Feliks is gone.”

“But that’s how you knew, or thought you knew, that Feliks was hurt and in Hôtel-Dieu.”

“Feliks died. No one told me. By a fluke I found out myself.”

Her anger rose. “Punching a flic and being thrown out of the criminal ward—you call that a fluke?”

Goran looked shocked. “I want to go.”

“Not until you tell me who you saw in the morning.”

“What?”

“How early did you go to Villa d’Alésia?”

His mouth hardened. “You got what you wanted. Leave me alone.”

“Had a coffee, maybe, at the corner café? Waited until people left for work to engage them in conversation like you were a neighbor?”

His eyes flashed. But by then she’d registered the tattoos just visible on his wrist where his sleeve was rolled up. Those prison tattoos, like Feliks’s. She controlled her shudder.

“You’re good at that, playing someone else—that’s how you got your job here, non? You neglected to reveal your prison time, I bet.” She pointed to his tattoo. “Almost talked your way past the reception at Hôtel-Dieu …” She paused for effect. Raised her Beretta again. “Cough up and quit wasting my time.”

His lip curled.

“Feeling uncooperative? Then so am I.” She shrugged. “The café’s video surveillance shows the street movement. All I need to do is identify you to the flics. Let them deal with—”

“Eight A.M.,” he said, his voice monotone now.

She’d made up the video camera, but he bought it.

“Give me the morning timeline.” She drew another line, curved like Villa d’Alésia to rue d’Alésia. “Point out who you spoke with and where.”

He’d only spoken to the café owner, it turned out. She thought back to Yuri’s message while she’d been at the morgue, and later when he’d warned her off—around 9:45, according to when she’d checked her Tintin watch.

“I took the Métro around nine thirty, my job starts at ten,” he said flatly. Glanced upward at the five time cards in metal slots behind the door. “Check my time card.”

She did. Too late for Goran to have been the one to murder Yuri.

“But here at this house—did you see anyone enter? Hear shouting?”

He shook his head.

“Or see the white van again?”

He pointed to the X she’d made. “A little man with a Cossack hat went in there.”

Yuri. Her pulse raced. “Would that have been nine or closer to nine fifteen?”

“Like that.”

Loud voices came from somewhere in the stable. Had Serge’s autopsy sparked the flics already? “Was he carrying something, like a package?”

Goran shrugged. “A taxi blocked my view.”

“But you remembered him.”

“I remember Russians in my country with hats like that. Then the woman got out of the taxi.”

“You mean Tatyana, the blonde who hired your brother, don’t you?” Battling her rising nausea, she realized one of the voices she’d just heard outside in the stable was familiar. A Serbian accent. Not the flics. Her throat tightened.

“No. Tall, thin.” A snort of laughter. “Tatyana owes me my brother’s funeral money. More.” A smile spread over Goran’s face. “Big connections with a rich man, she told me, nice commission.”

No wonder he suddenly oozed cockiness. He hadn’t called the Serbs off. Dumb to believe him. “You lied to me. Bad move, Goran.”

From the corner of her eye, she caught his hand creeping under the straw to the pitchfork. She pulled a horse blanket from the stall over him. Instead of grabbing the pitchfork, he tossed the blanket aside, lunging forward to grab her arm. The move slowed him down, put him off balance for the seconds she needed. She kicked dust in his eyes, sidestepped him, then kicked his ankle. Hard. He landed on his back with an ouff. She cocked the Beretta’s hammer.

“Want me to shoot your toes first, or your knees?”

“Non, non.” Sweat broke out on his forehead. He rubbed his watering eyes, which kept darting toward the stall door—looking for his backup.

“Now you’re an accomplice to murder and robbery, and I’ll be sure to implicate your friends.”

“Good luck, bitch.”

“No luck involved.” She reached up to the alarm system box. Pulled it.

Silence. No piercing shrieks. Merde.

Only blinking red lights. A silent alarm designed to avoid frightening the horses? She hoped so.

At the half-door she turned. “What made you remember the woman who got out of the taxi?”

“Reminded me of you, bitch.”

This is what she’d expected him to say, but bile rose in her throat nonetheless. But she couldn’t think about that now. She grabbed a riding helmet from the wall and strapped it on. Panic filled her as she crouched down behind hay bales and shooed off buzzing flies.

Goran was shouting something in Serbian. She heard approaching footsteps and banging stall doors. Any moment now, they’d discover her.

On her left, a stable hand led out the last horse by the reins. Straightening up, and shielded by the horse’s body, she kept pace with its front legs as the Serb thugs passed by the stalls.

She couldn’t count on the silent alarm working. Once clear, she hurried through the side stable and found the fire alarm box. Broke the glass and pulled the switch. Loud whoops blasted in the stable and barn. Horses neighed in the exercise ring.

“Where’s the fire?” the stable hand shouted at her.

“No fire. Terrorists. Lock down the stable.”

“Aren’t you with the Red Cross?”

“Undercover.” His mouth dropped open. “No time for explanations. Tell the team it’s the Serbs. Give this to the vet.” She handed him the autopsy. “Seems Goran ripped you high and dry.”

By the time she made it to the bus stop, fire engines and unmarked cars were whizzing toward the stables. She took the first bus that stopped. Concentrated on breathing deep, the window beside her open to the pollen of the chestnut trees. The rest faded in and out, passing in a blur. Nerves, the residual effects of the drugs, and the revelation of her mother warred in her system.

She changed buses and boarded one in the direction Denfert-Rochereau. Why couldn’t the driver go faster? She had to get back to the office. Somewhere ahead there had to be the Métro station.

From the window, she saw a van pull abreast of the bus, honking at straggling schoolchildren on the zebra-striped crosswalk. A white Renault van with temporary license plates, sporting a chrome muffler held to the bumper with wire.

And then it all came back to her—the dark lane, Saj honking at the white van with its bumper trailing on the cobbles. That’s what she couldn’t remember, what Goran heard but couldn’t see. The driver had stopped to reattach the dragging muffler so he wouldn’t be noticed or given a ticket.

Aimée had to get off the bus. She rushed toward the back doors, which were closing. She wedged herself through and got a mouthful of exhaust as the bus took off.

Worried, she looked around for the van. Traffic surged ahead at the green light. Where had it gone so fast?

The pavement shifted like sand under her feet. Passersby scurried around her. Didn’t they feel this shifting, this rumbling from the Métro trains below? Or were the underground quarry tunnels fissuring, cracking open, the streets opening to sinkholes?

Blood rushed to her head. She put one foot in front of her, yet she stood stuck in the same place, under the globed street lamp glinting in the sun. Why hadn’t anyone noticed? Why was she sinking to the pavement? Slipping into darkness.…

AIMÉE OPENED HER eyes. Sunlight streamed through shutter slats, warming her toes. She lay curled on soft pigskin leather—a toffee-colored divan—luscious. She stretched.

Then it hit her—the white van.

“You’re pale, breathing shallow.” A young woman with short red hair à la gamine and tortoise-shell glasses felt her pulse. “Eaten today, Mademoiselle?”

“But I have to catch.…” She tried to sit up. Her elbows slipped and her legs didn’t cooperate. The tang of old leather-bound books and paper hovered in the warm air.

Where in the world …? A ticking wooden ormolu clock on the wall read 1:20 P.M. Twenty or thirty minutes had gone by. The van was long gone by now. Hopeless.

“Desolée, but I don’t know where I am.” She shook her head. Felt a wave of dizziness. “Or how I got here.”

“You fainted in front of the Observatoire’s side entrance,” the woman said. “A teacher on a school field trip brought you into my office.”

Embarrassed, Aimée looked at the woman’s name tag. Doctor Sylvie Taitbout.

“Desolée, doctor,” she said.

“I’m just the PhD kind. Call me Sylvie,” she said, smiling. “I study black holes between the stars.”

Aimée became aware of the posters of planets and galaxies lining the walls. The notebooks piled on the desk beside framed family photos. “You’re an astronomer.”

“Guilty,” she smiled. “I research planetary nebulae in the optical regions of external galaxies—finding tools to understand the late stellar evolution in varying galactic environments. That kind of stuff.” Her mouth turned serious. “Ecoutes, you are exhibiting the symptoms my sister had—anemia compounded by stress. Unpleasant combo. Serious, too. Let me ring your doctor.”

Children’s voices drifted in from the window, along with jasmine scents and humid air.

“Thanks for your concern, but I feel better already,” Aimée said. She had to get going. “My blood sugar gets low. Just need some air.”

“Up to you,” Sylvie said, but she handed Aimée a grapefruit juice from her bag. And a banana. “I insist.”

“Merci.”

“Have your doctor run tests,” Sylvie said. “Does anemia run in your family? Any history with your mother?”

A pang hit her. This woman probably took for granted that all Parisian mothers take Sunday afternoon walks in the Luxembourg Gardens arm in arm with their husbands after the midday roast chicken—a classic déjeuner de famille. Well, not Aimée’s. “No history to speak of.”

Sylvie took off her glasses to clean them, revealing small birdlike eyes. “Mothers don’t tell you everything.”

So true. In her case, nothing. No road map. During the lycée, she’d observed Martine’s mother and secretly recorded her observations in a notebook. Like they did in biology class, cultivating nuclei in a petri dish and recording reactions and behaviors. She made an effort to decipher this species down to each detail—from Martine’s mother’s tweed beige jackets to her effortless soufflés, from her warm living room cluttered with bright pillows and books to the way she wiped her toddler’s runny nose while reminding the girls with a smile to say “merci” at the boulangerie.

“Is everything all right?” Sylvie asked. “Anything on your mind?”

Sylvie seemed like the type of counselor the flics should have assigned to her the other night after the accident. Aimée knew she should take better care of herself. Why had she quit yoga? But without René to insist.…

“Been under more stress lately?”

Apart from her best friend’s defection to America, Saj’s injury, the murder of an old man who’d known her long-gone mother, a stolen Modigliani, death threats from Serbs, being attacked in her office and almost drowned in a bucket.…

“A little more than usual,” Aimée admitted.

And just when she’d stumbled on the van, she’d lost it again. Her chance to find the painting. Her mother, ever elusive, a vague shadow who loomed in the background.

“Try to relax.”

With people out to torture her and only a few hours left? Aimée sat up with mounting dread and scrambled for her boots.

“You’ve been so kind,” she said, standing with a wobble and pulling down her Sonia Rykiel tunic. “But I must go.…”

“Not before you share my tartine and I see you can function. We’ll go to the garden.”

Too weak to argue, Aimée nodded. She and Sylvie sat on a bench in the garden bordered by a gravel drive. An islet of peace bounded by green hedges and old stonework fronting the Observatoire, a blackened limestone-like château punctuated with a rounded verdigris metal globe roof, which dwarfed the trees. “When the king ordered the Observatoire built, this was countryside,” Sylvie told her. “Far from the lights of Paris and perfect for the telescopes. By 1900 the street gaslights rendered them useless. Today we measure and calculate the heavens with computers.”

“Vraiment?” Yet, didn’t numerical equations and statistics neglect the allure of the night sky, of wishing upon a star?

Aimée munched the crisp tartine slathered with Brie, pear slices, and cornichons. She felt color returning to her cheeks. It had been stupid to forget to eat.

“Loaded up?” Sylvie shouted to someone behind the hedge on the gravel drive. It was woman in a hoodie and jeans, loading file boxes into the side door of a van. Aimée noticed how the woman kept her head down. Noticed the white Renault van with a temporary plate. The grapefruit juice in her hand trembled.

But how many new white vans drove in Paris?

“She’ll hit traffic. Running late as usual,” Sylvie said.

“Who’s that?” Aimée asked.

“Morgane delivers our instruments. Receives our air-shipped data drives.”

“You use a service from Orly?”

“The van belongs to the Observatoire.”

Could this be the one?

“So it’s kept here at night.” Yuri’s place was in the quartier, only three Métro stations away.

“Why?”

Aimée shrugged. “Guess you’ve got a big budget.”

“Think so? Morgane’s only part-time. They’re cutting back on everything, even research hours.” Sylvie glanced at her watch. “Desolée,” she said, standing, “I’ve got an appointment measuring a black hole.” She smiled. “Take care of yourself.”

Morgane spoke on a cell phone, her gaze fixed on Aimée. A frisson went up her spine. Had she gone paranoid again? Or did this tingling mean something?

Paranoid or not, she wrote down the front license plate number with her kohl eye pencil. She’d need to get closer to see the bumper. Before she could make it to the driveway, the engine turned over, gravel spit, and she saw the muffler wired to the bumper as it took off.

She’d found it—the white van that had pulled in front of them on Villa d’Alésia, the one Goran noticed circling the block. By the time she ran back to the bench and got Dombasle on the phone, the van had gone.

“This might be nothing, but.…” Aimée said, hesitating.

“Anything to do with the Modigliani interests me,” Dombasle prompted.

“Could you check for any traffic video surveillance installed on rue d’Alésia?”

“Mind telling me what I’d be looking for?”

“A white Renault van, license 750825693, belonging to the Observatoire, that could have circled Villa d’Alésia and rue de Châtillon the night of the robbery at, say, eight P.M.?”

“I’d need to call in favors,” he said, the interest gone from his voice. “You’re saying it’s important?”

“I suspect it’s the van that was used in the robbery.” And she needed them off her back, but she kept that to herself. Hadn’t Luebet addressed his message to M … Morgane? “Maybe Luebet was behind this. If so, Morgane’s the woman to talk to.”

“Several witness statements mention a white van. One of those statements has your name on it.” Pause. “What haven’t you told me?”

“It’s complicated,” she said. “But I think she broke into my office.”

“Think or know?”

“The only sure things in life are death and taxes, Raphael,” she said. “They blindfolded me and held my head under water.”

“But Luebet’s dead, and according to his message.…”

She couldn’t be sure if Luebet’s team had found the painting, and it had long disappeared. But she needed to light a fire under Dombasle. “His team’s still searching,” she interrupted. “You’d put it past them to kill Yuri? Alors, they gave me twenty-four hours to find the painting.”

There, she admitted it. Hadn’t wanted to, but she needed his help.

“So that’s why you came to me,” he said. “No goodwill involved.”

Playing hurt all of a sudden? Hadn’t he’d drafted her for a sting with a crooked antiquaire? A ploy she was more and more skeptical about.

“Raphael, didn’t you tell me art thieves were up your alley and homicide up la Crim’s?”

She’d burned her bridges with Morbier, who had deserted her. Couldn’t expect Saj to run at full speed. If Raphael didn’t cooperate, she didn’t know who else to ask. Her options narrowed to zero. “Someone threatened me. Can’t you check this out? Isn’t this your job?”

“Morgane’s known to us, that’s if she’s the same one,” he said. “A Morgane Tulle came up flagged in the file. Luebet’s former employee who served time.”

The connection. “Does she work at the Observatoire now?”

“You want an answer off the top of my head?”

She brightened. “But you’ll follow up?”

“Meet me at thirty four rue Delambre at six P.M.” He clicked off.

She felt a tremor of relief—this should lessen her chance of torture—but it still didn’t help her find the Modigliani. Or her mother.

AIMÉE TOOK A taxi, had it circle rue du Louvre three times. Satisfied no one was following, she overtipped the driver. Always good insurance for rainy-night taxi karma.

Back in the office, she popped open a Badoit and did some neck rolls. Better. She thumbed the report Saj had culled from details on the oligarch’s dealings in Gazprom, the now privatized Ukraine petroleum giant.

“Bereskova took a fiscal nosedive into concrete last year but somehow reinvented himself, see?” Saj said, from his cross-legged position on the tatami. “Look at page eight. Seems he made himself indispensable to major players in the past few months.”

“They call it krysha—rub my back big-time, I’ll rub yours. Any more details?” She needed more. Something smelled wrong.

Saj readjusted his neck brace. “That’s as far as I got.”

“Didn’t you work with that Russian hacker, René’s friend, for a while?”

“Rasputin,” he said. “The wild man.”

A living Internet legend, Rasputin snuck into a missile engine testing facility north of Moscow with his hacker pack. They breached military security through a hole in the fence of a factory dating back to the Soviet era—still producing engines for Russia’s space and military programs.

The Kremlin discovered Rasputin’s photos of the Cold War-era facility with giant turbines, tunnels, tubes, Soviet emblems, and a bomb shelter. And his penetration of the missile system mainframe. Rasputin claimed his aim was to increase awareness over security.

“The man knows no fear,” Saj said.

“So pick his brain,” she said.

“Good idea.” With ginger movements, he picked up his shoulder bag. “My acupuncturist squeezed me in, do you mind?”

She’d prefer to hash ideas out with him. But every time he turned, she noticed his body tighten.

“Bien sûr,” she said. “I hope it helps.”

“Before I forget, thanks for dealing with the Serb. You got my back. Desolé, I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

She’d called from the taxi and recounted what happened in the stables on the way back. “I pitied Goran—a refugee from a war-torn country, an exiled doctor reduced to shoveling horse muck. His brother’s death devastated him. The aggressors were victims once.” She stared at Saj. “But then I wasn’t so sure.”

“Talk about karma. You gave him a chance, showed compassion, Aimée.” Saj shrugged, then adjusted his neck brace yet again. “Ever thought the whole thing was a lie told by a mercenary or a war criminal?”

She thought of Goran’s anguish, so palpable it had raised the hair on her arms. “But if you’d heard him cry.…”

“Going soft, Aimée? You?”

“Soft as in not shooting his toes?” She’d wanted to.

Saj shook his head. “Alors, this circle of samsara, c’est fini,” he said. “Thank God.”

She wished she felt the same.

“But the van, Saj.…”

“You alerted the art flic, didn’t you?” he said. “Let him do his job. I’ll alarm the door on my way out.”

What more could she do right now but assuage her guilt and pull her weight? She’d review reports and ink the two new computer security contracts. A ray of light shone in the accounting: Leduc Detective was floating on a cushion this month, and would continue into the next. Made for a change.

Aimée sipped the Badoit, thumbed the printouts Maxence had left on Yuri Volodya. Apart from his Trotskyist leanings in the seventies, nothing interesting. Looked at the names on her to-do list and let them simmer.

She removed Piotr Volodya’s letters from the safe. About to scan and copy them, she remembered Marevna’s boss’s interruption and their missed appointment last night.

She needed to see the big picture. Think big. Find the pieces and how they fit together.

She dusted off the dry erase board behind René’s old desk and rustled up a working red marker. With the board propped on the velvet recamier, she wrote down the suspects, made columns—Motives, Opportunities, Victims, Stakes—to cross-reference. Like her father always did. Something she wished she’d done earlier. Now to fill them in: Stakes—money, prestige, a priceless Modigliani, a commodity to trade. Robbery suspects—Luebet, Morgane; Tatyana and Oleg’s crew; Damien; Feliks and Goran.

But someone was missing. From Luebet’s note, she knew he’d never gotten the painting. He could have had nothing to do with the team in the white van, who might have stolen the painting before Tatyana and Oleg’s hired Serbs got there. But hearing Dombasle confirm Morgane once worked for Luebet, she couldn’t shake her hunch that Luebet hired Morgane to steal the painting. So what was another explanation? Perhaps Luebet had hired Morgane, but she’d fenced the painting herself before turning it over to him. Or she never got it at all, because the painting was already gone. If Luebet’s gang and the Serb found the broom closet empty—as Yuri had—who had stolen the Modigliani?

Back to the beginning again.

Or either Oleg and Damien could have taken it, in theory; they were the only people she was sure knew where Yuri had hidden it. But which? Damien had insisted Yuri forgot things, and Oleg and Tatyana had offered her a percentage.

Or had the fixer beat everyone to it?

The door alarm shrieked and she dropped her Badoit. Flecks of mineral water sprayed over the erase board. Terror thudded through her. They’d returned.

Why had she trusted Dombasle? She took out the Beretta, checked the cartridge. Aimed.

“Merde!” she heard from the other side of the frosted glass.

But she knew that voice. She punched in the security code and opened the door.

René leaned in Leduc Detective’s doorway, his linen jacket stained, a large straw hat held in one hand and a duty-free bag in the other. Her heart jumped. She wanted to hug him.

“Forget something?” she said, finding her voice.

His brow knit in worry and pain.

“My common sense, Aimée. Mind setting your gun down? Look, I need to get the relay codes … don’t have time.…”

His words tore her heart. Apparently he wouldn’t be staying.

“So the corporate jet’s waiting at Orly, eh? Need to rush back to your millions?”

He shook his head. “I don’t like them dirty, Aimée. Look, I’ve got four hours, maybe six.…”

Her hurt bubbled to the surface. “Before you leave again?”

He limped inside and pulled out his laptop from the duty-free bag. “If I don’t stop them, I’m in a little trouble.”

His tone made her stand still. “Sounds like big trouble, René.”

“Tradelert’s front running and I secured the back door in their damn system. Now if I don’t disable it.…” He hobbled to his desk. Must be his hip, she thought. “Please just let me work. I need my tools here. Can I explain later?”

“Go ahead,” she said, surprised. “Why the sombrero?”

“Mexico City.”

“I thought you.…”

“Long story, Aimée. I’ve had ten hours on the flight to prepare,” he said. “Think I’ve found a shortcut to rewind the algorithms, circumvent the disabler. But it’s all contingent on the clone providing me access. From here.”

She understood less than half of what he’d just said.

“If I don’t execute preventive measures, Wall Street will come after me and it’ll be all my fault. Not now, maybe tomorrow.…” He opened his desk drawer. “Then I’ll leave.”

Aimée bit her lip. She’d never seen René so upset. Or with a stain on his jacket. “Can I help?”

René connected his laptop to the terminal, his eyes never leaving the screen. “Call Saj. Tell him I need his eyes and his old relay and delay codes. Use my car.”

His car. Aimée looked away.

She heard a buzz—the alarm had been disabled. Saj walked in with Maxence. “I forgot my herbs … René!” He shot Aimée a look.

She shrugged.

“Long time no see, René. At least three days.”

René kept his eyes on the screen. “Still have your relay and delay programs here?”

“Bien sûr,” Saj said.

“Let me help too, René,” Maxence said, smiling. “No luggage? Means you’re going to stay a while, I hope.”

René looked up. His green eyes widened at Saj’s neck brace, his arm in a sling. “Saj? Mon Dieu, are you all right?”

“Did you tell him, Aimée?”

“Not now, Saj.”

A knowing look passed over René’s face. “My car? Never mind, are you okay?”

“All systems go,” Saj said, rubbing his good hand. “Two seconds for me to dig out that program. But I think you’ll be more interested in the newer version.”

Glancing at the time, Aimée reached for her scarf and left them to it.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, on rue Delambre, she pushed open the tall green door into a courtyard. She felt like she’d stepped back in time. A cold dampness crept up her legs. Ivy trailed the walls of faded tea-stain-colored stuccoed workshops, timbered two- and three-storied ateliers roofed by zinc tiles. Tall windows, like dead eyes in the twilight, faced northern exposure—as favored by artists. Skylights dotted the slanted roofs, glowing patches swept by the beacon light of the Eiffel Tower. A mustard-colored cat padded over the wet cobbles at her approach. Strains of a high-pitched binioù kozh bagpipe trailed from the Ti ar Vretoned, the Breton cultural center at the heart of the courtyard.

She wondered why Dombasle insisted on meeting here. What happened to the vernissage? Inside the large hall of the Breton cultural center, children held hands in a wide circle, dancing, concentration on their faces. The girls wore lace caps, kicking and performing intricate back steps. The sheepskin pipes wheezed in the background.

“Any luck on the white van?” Aimée said, sidling up to Dombasle by the Breton-language bulletin board.

“The traffic chief’s daughter-in-law went to school with my sister,” he said. “Life’s a gratin, non? The white van with corresponding license plates clocked Avenue du Général Leclerc’s traffic cameras at Alésia five times within an hour.”

That confirmed what she’d thought. He’d come through. “Et voilà.”

The music and the dancers’ pounding feet made it hard to hear. She edged closer and caught Dombasle’s scent. A woodsy musk … Aramis? Stupid, she needed to focus.

“Morgane’s on parole,” Dombasle said. “A single mother, eager to talk.”

“She confessed?”

“Nothing we can use.”

Would Aimée have to drag each word out of him? But she smiled. “Meaning?”

“Luebet hired her to organize the job. She admitted to planning and hiring her accomplices: Servier, to break into Volodya’s atelier, and a mec called Flèche to transport the painting to Orly. But someone else beat him to it, Servier says, no painting. A mec punched Servier, he returned the favor and ran.”

“But you can arraign them on breaking and entering.”

“After the fact.”

Flics always worried about technicalities and judges.

“You don’t call screwing up my building door, drugging and almost drowning me in a bucket in my office …?”

Ahead of them, a mother with her child in her arms turned in alarm.

“Blindfolded, weren’t you?” Dombasle said, his voice lower. “Can you prove who did it?”

Her head hurt—the music and the dense air made it hard to think.

She forced herself to remember. Felt those large hands shoving her head down as she gasped for air, water filling her mouth, her nose, down her throat, her lungs bursting. Those hands ripping her hair. Stop, she had to go back to the voice on the phone. Remember. The slushing tires over wet pavement, the car horns, the street sounds. No doubt the call came from a pay phone. Useless.

“Morgane blamed it on the hot-tempered amateur she’d hired,” Dombasle said, pulling out a notebook from his pocket. Consulted it. “This Flèche. She said he’d threatened to take things in his own hands.”

“Rounded him up yet?

He turned pages in the notebook, sucked in his breath. “You could say that. We discovered his corpse in a rented room close to Yuri Volodya’s. The concierge heard a gunshot. Saw a tall female figure leave the courtyard.”

Aimée shivered. The fixer?

“So make it up, Dombasle,” she said. “Morgane doesn’t know if the blindfold slipped, if I saw her mec leave. That I couldn’t identity him from a mug shot.”

Lie, she wanted to say. Force the truth. That’s the flics’ speciality.

“You’re scared,” he said, his tone changing to concern.

“No wonder you’re a detective,” she said. Her mind went back to poor Yuri tied to his kitchen sink, to Madame Figuer, his neighbor, the sobbing tale of her brother water-tortured on rue des Saussaies.

Dombasle enveloped her hand in his warm ones. Calming and firm. “You’re shaking.”

“Going to ask me to dance?” she said.

A smile lit up his gold-flecked eyes. “Tango’s more my style. I want you to meet that man drinking cider over there.”

Aimée’s phone vibrated. She needed air.

“Meet you in a moment, I’ve got to take this call.”

She didn’t want to talk to anyone, but it could be Saj or René. Another break-in attempt?

“Aimée, given any thought to chapter titles for my book?” Martine asked.

“Book?” Her heel caught in the cracks of the damp cobbles. She grabbed the ivy trellis for support just in time.

“The style editor’s on my back.”

“Right now, Martine?”

Martine blew a long exhale. Aimée imagined the nicotine rush, the cigarette’s spiraling blue smoke. She’d kill for a cigarette right now.

“What’s wrong? I hear it in your voice. But you can’t bail on me, Aimée. Not now.”

A couple hurried past her into the Breton center.

“You know you’re going to tell me,” Martine said.

Where to begin?

“Does this have to do with Saj running over that Serb?”

“He didn’t kill him.” She gave Martine the capsule version. And threw in how she’d seen Melac lip-locked with a blonde.

“Not that again! You know you were wrong before—remember, with Guy, the eye surgeon, the one I liked? He had his arm around his sister. And you were blind. Literally.”

Like she could forget.

“If Melac’s undercover … Alors, he’s got to do.…” Martine’s voice wavered, “what he’s got to do.”

“Not like that.”

“Bon, at least René’s back.”

“I can’t count on him with all—”

“But his tuxedo’s still at the cleaners, non?” Martine interrupted. “He’ll escort you to the wedding. The couturier alteration appointment’s the day after tomorrow. Don’t forget.”

Aimée wanted to smack herself. The vintage blue Dior. No way could she fit into it.

“But I’ve gained a kilo.” More.

“It’ll be a piece of gâteau for an old pro from Patou.”

“Letting out seams for a whale?” she said. “Martine, she’ll have to sew me into it.”

“Like Marilyn Monroe, eh?” Martine said. “By the way, ELLE’s sending a photographer to the wedding.”

She cringed inside. The camera would add even more kilos.

“Vintage couture works at a hip wedding,” Martine went on. “We’ll make it the book’s last chapter, of course. C’est parfait.”

Then it hit her. An idea that Martine, a born journalist, would eat up.

“What if I interested the oligarch’s wife in an interview with you? Couple it with a fashion shoot—besides the usual magazine sidebar on the über-wealthy slum-shopping? With a photo spread?” Aimée said, thinking as she spoke. “If you got the style editor on board and suggested an ensemble piece … you know, a little fashion voyage you whip into an article and use in the book. Nothing wasted.”

A little suck of breath. “You could make that happen, Aimée?”

“Her bodyguard likes me. Her female bodyguard.” A little too much.

“A female Russian bodyguard? Ooh, that could work for the shoot. I see Slavic cheekbones, toned body in a black leather catsuit.”

“Picture a business suit and biceps, Martine,” she said. “I’m meeting her for a drink later.”

“Bien sûr, you’re a big girl, you can handle yourself,” Martine said.

“The things I do for you, Martine,” she said, letting out a sigh. “She can take people down. Probably trained at the KGB.”

“It’s the FSB now.”

The second person to tell her that today.

“Then you’re interested?” Aimée paced back and forth on the dimly lit cobbles.

She heard keys tapping on a keyboard.

“Don’t be silly. I’m emailing the editor right now to see if we can make this month’s deadline.”

“So do me a favor. Explore her husband Dmitri Bereskova’s projected ‘art’ museum, who he owes krysha, and if a Modigliani would put him back on top.”

Martine sighed into the phone. “Why do I think you’ve been angling me into getting information all along?”

Dombasle waved from inside.

“Remember Bereskova’s art museum, Martine. Dombasle’s beckoning.…”

“Dombasle as in Rafael de la Dombasle, son of the noted painter?”

Did that explain his intello air? “Told me he’s an art cop. Got to go.”

AT THE COUNTER Dombasle introduced her to Huppert. Mid-thirties, sparse brown hair, black jacket and jeans, he stood a head shorter than her, with a glass of sparkling apple cider in hand.

“This is the one I told you about,” Dombasle said.

“You know I only do business at the gallery,” Huppert said. No smile.

Feeling awkward, she wished they’d open a window. The close air of too many bodies coupled with the pounding feet made it hard to think. She wondered why Dombasle insisted on meeting this uninterested man.

“We won’t have a chance later. You’re always busy at receptions,” Dombasle said.

“I’ve got to report on Maiwen’s progress to my wife,” Huppert said. “Her Breton culture’s like a religion to her. Wants Maiwen to learn Breton, move to Vannes.” He smiled at a flush-faced young girl, thick black hair in a ponytail, who winked back at him. “I draw the line at living near Montparnasse, that’s as Breton-ville as I get. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

Give this man high points for rudeness. Then again, one had to respect people’s privacy. But Dombasle was not going to let him go so easily.

“Show him the photo from Luebet’s envelope.”

There in the crowded hall, despite her misgivings, Aimée showed Huppert the Polaroid of Luebet and Yuri holding the small painting.

Huppert glanced at the photo. Looked again and set down the cider. Intent now, he put out his hand. “May I?”

She handed him the photo, and after a moment he beckoned them out the doors, past the foyer and into the courtyard.

“Why didn’t the old fox Luebet mention this?” he muttered under the lamplight.

“A little late now,” Dombasle said.

“I heard.” Huppert shook his head, his gaze fixed on the Polaroid. “Terrible.”

Aimée wanted to scream. Little good that would do now. Both men in the photo had been murdered; the Modigliani had vanished.

“How did you get this, Mademoiselle?” Huppert said.

“That’s not the point. He says you’re the Modigliani expert. What do you think?”

“From a bad photo?” He shook his head. “Do you know how many faux Modiglianis come across the gallery doorstep in a week?”

Be that way, Monsieur Expert, she wanted to say, but bit her tongue. “It’s not my intention to pass anything off on you. Nor was it my idea to come here. We’re wasting everyone’s time,” she said, reaching for the Polaroid.

She had Piotr’s Volodya’s letters to authenticate and give provenance. To her thinking, Yuri never intended for his wife’s son to inherit the painting. But if Huppert knew and it got back to Oleg, repercussions could follow; inheritance issues, a long court case.

But Huppert didn’t let go. “Un moment.” He pulled out readers from his pocket and studied it more closely.

“What bothers me is why someone would leave a Modigliani—say it’s real—in a damp cellar for more than seventy years,” Dombasle said. “All of a sudden it reappears, an old man claims it’s stolen but refuses to make a robbery report. He’s murdered, and then after that the art appraiser. But where’s the provenance, or credential of its authenticity, even some mention that this portrait of Lenin ever existed?”

Piotr’s letters to his son explained some of it. Before Aimée could speak, Dombasle shot her a look to keep quiet.

“Lenin’s wife, Comrade Krupskaya, hated Paris—and it wasn’t just the weather. No one knows or will ever know the true story. Just background for you,” Huppert said. “My research paper on les artistes Russes in Montparnasse touched on this.”

Aimée wanted to hear something that would lead them to the painting, not an academic lecture. She was running out of time.

“Local Bolshies recounted that Lenin carried on an affair,” Huppert said. “Few knew, but his wife Krupskaya guarded his reputation and fostered the myth with an iron hand. What papers she didn’t burn she invalidated. Anyone whose silence she didn’t trust got discredited. The comrade-wife had a stake in Lenin, she’d devoted her life to him.”

Huppert paused to wave to his daughter inside.

“The reason this excites me—faux or not, it’s a significant work. The bad quality can’t mask the earth tones, that musted luminosity. So much raw energy in the set of his jaw.” For a moment Huppert’s voice changed, sounded far away. “To me this portrait communicates a vulnerable man, maybe even doubtful, on the cusp of something new. A man who could be in love, non?” He nodded to himself, studying the Polaroid. “So unlike those ragged greatcoat-leading-the-masses portraits—a powerful persona he promoted, the image Krupskaya fostered until her dying day. Lenin would have rejected this. Rumors of this painting surfaced years ago when Khrushchev visited Lenin’s museum.”

“What kind of rumors?”

“Le Parisien reporters discovered—or so they said—an old madam who counted Lenin as a client at her bordello across from the Archives Nationales. Seems he would stop by after a long day of research. Contradicts the Lenin myth, the ascetic father of the people. Why shouldn’t Lenin go for the fruit of the flesh elsewhere, since his wife’s mother had their bedroom and lived with them for years?” He shrugged. “But morality aside, another item came up. More serious.”

Aimée realized she’d been holding her breath. She pulled her coat tighter in the damp chill.

“Twelve years ago, a descendent of Cortot, Modigliani’s first dealer—that relationship was short-lived—brought papers for me to appraise and make sense of. He’d found them in the family château’s attic. A job I do with annoying frequency.” Huppert gave a sigh. His breath fogged in the chilly evening air. “Old collectors die and the family hopes there’s a treasure stashed.” He paused. “I’m straying. An entry marked ‘unpaid’ in Cortot’s ledger lists a portrait commissioned by Lenin.”

“Would that be in 1910?” Aimée asked.

Huppert thought. Rocked on his heels. Studied her for a moment. “That or 1911. Cortot couldn’t collect the commission. Not surprising since Modi hated painting commissions. He refused, to all his dealers’ despair. But maybe Lenin paid him with a bottle. Who knows? Cortot heard the buzz from the café crowd and sniffed money.”

A couple entered the courtyard. Huppert waited for them to pass. Their laughter echoed off the stone and frightened the cat from the bushes. With the dark-blue smear of sky above the damp foliage, this once-artisanal backwater felt timeless.

When the couple was gone, Aimée asked, “Was there an exhibition of Lenin’s portrait?”

“None documented. The trail dried up,” he said. “Until Pauline. She posed for Modi, fourteen years old at the time, at his second dealer’s. Alas, she’s dead. But fifteen years ago she told me that Lenin and Modi had a known rivalry. But that could be said of all his friends at one time or another—call Modi charming and infuriating at the best of times. Cadged his meals and drinks from drawings, slept at friends’.”

“All for art, you mean?” Aimée asked.

“Forget the tragic romantic,” Huppert said. “Modi produced an incredible body of work. We know so much got lost—drugging and drinking to anesthetize the pain from rampant TB. He was so anxious to hide it, he’d drink even more.”

Where did this lead? “You mean Pauline knew of the painting?”

Huppert expelled air from his lips. Shrugged. “Apparently Modi complained to her about Lenin. Called him a fanatic who covered up his own doubts to convince himself.”

“Doubts over what?”

“Fanatics must prove something to themselves and others,” Huppert said. “He challenged Lenin at la Rotonde one night, burned Lenin’s newspaper—that we know from documents.”

“Some kind of duel?”

“Pauline heard him say, ‘I will show the real you. I only paint truth.’ And he did, she said. Lenin hated the portrait.”

Again, Huppert studied the Polaroid. “He’s holding what could be a booklet. At the time, an infamous manifesto against Marx’s ideology circulated among the Bolsheviks. It refuted everything Lenin stood for. Who’s to say he’s not holding it here? Or agreed with parts of it, suffered doubts, ideological turmoil? That would have created a scandal. Maybe he recovered his zeal or had to later take power. Lead the Revolution. But here Modi slammed it in his face.”

“What difference does it make today?” Aimée said. “The USSR doesn’t even exist anymore.”

Huppert checked his watch. As if he needed to leave but couldn’t tear himself away from this Polaroid.

“Communists in Russia venerate Lenin, keep his reputation unsullied—the government pays lip service to Marxism. No poster boys left after Stalin,” he said. “What’s embalmed in the Red Square mausoleum isn’t just waxed fruit to the older generation, or to the government who want to keep the ideology alive. The French Communists and trade unions take pride in the fact that Lenin lived and formulated his theories here. The cradle of the Revolution.”

This put a new spin on things. Still, she wasn’t sure how it could matter now.

“You’re saying Modigliani’s painting of Lenin could have had political implications?” Dombasle asked, stepping closer. “Rippling through the Kremlin, debunking the Lenin myth, tossing the textbooks or something?”

Huppert shrugged. “In 1910, Lenin was one among many exiles, no one special, banished to the edges of Paris, living on scraps among a small Russian community. Back then, Trotsky had more followers.”

“So you’re saying …?”

“Lenin hated Trotsky. Thought he’d clawed his way to prominence, used whatever means he had to recruit followers.”

Aimée still didn’t buy it. “Who cares now?”

“What if this painting’s implications threaten an ideology?” Huppert insisted. “Think who stands to lose if Lenin’s unmasked. That’s sacrilege. Of course, that’s the infamous diatribe against Marx. But to know, I need to see the painting.”

“You mean Modigliani sabotaged Lenin?”

“Modigliani painted the truth he saw in people. He never compromised. Wealthy patrons came out ugly and fat. To him, Lenin was a pedantic Russian nursing one drink all night. Just one man among many exiles.”

Dombasle’s phone trilled. He turned away to answer it. Now or never. Aimée forced herself to speak.

“Do you know the fixer?”

Huppert’s brows rose. “She’s involved?”

Her mouth went dry. “It’s not clear,” she managed. “But do you know her?”

“Very connected and out of my league,” he said. “That’s all I know. Ask Dombasle.”

Maiwen, his daughter, appeared at his side. “Did you watch me, Papa?”

“Bien sûr, ma puce,” he said, now the adoring father.

Maiwen skipped ahead and Huppert hesitated. “The art world’s a deep sea: currents, whirlpools, sucking tides. Amateurs navigate at their peril.”

Like she didn’t know that?

“In over my head, I know. Not my choice,” Aimée said, “but you’re salivating even contemplating this.”

His shoulders stiffened.

She’d hit home.

“You think it’s real, n’est-ce pas?”

“Branches grow the way the tree leans,” Huppert said. “Even in this bad Polaroid, such recognizable brushstrokes, the bold colors … it is prototypical of work from the period when he shared the studio with Soutine, in 1910. Yet this painting is so … so personal, unique, unlike anything else.” Huppert stared at her.

“Papa, we’re late,” called Maiwen from the entrance.

“When you find the Modigliani, as I sense you will, may I see it? Just once?”

Aimée slipped her card in his jacket pocket.

“Connect me to the fixer,” she said. “Then we’ll talk.”

She didn’t know if they would talk. But she did know he’d scored right on one thing. She would find the Modigliani.

It didn’t ride on money or prestige; it was a way to find her mother. And save her own life.

“THE ANTIQUAIRE SAYS tonight,” Dombasle said. He lingered at his red Fiat, a two-seater that reminded her of a large insect. A sixties classic and the size of a closet. “BRB’s handling logistics.”

“And your role?” Aimée asked, surprised. Didn’t he mastermind this?

“Let me set you straight,” he said. “I’m a recovered academic, an art historian, herded into the police academy, then right into administration of the art recovery unit. Our unit assembles evidence and decides whether there’s a case. I’m not often in the field.”

“So chatting up art dealers and crooks at the flea market—”

“A sideline,” he interrupted. “But I met you.” Grinned.

“Bottom line, you’re a flic,” she said.

“Job requirement. Dinner?”

“I’m late.” Her phone showed two calls from Svetla the Russian bodyguard. Her date. “Thought you had a vernissage to go to.”

“True. Hors d’oeuvres tonight by a three-star chef.”

“Enjoy.”

“The buy’s at ten P.M. Where can I pick you up?”

Good question. “Call me.”

She could have sworn disappointment crossed Dombasle’s face.

Aimée checked her messages. Svetla had left the name of a bar and the time for their rendez-vous. It was the last thing she wanted, but when she called Svetla back, her phone went to voice mail. Great. She hoped it wasn’t a leather bar. But first she had a stop to make.

MAREVNA—AN APRON tied around her waist over a T-shirt with IT’S BETTER IN THE UKRAINE—nodded to Aimée. She set down a bowl of maroon borscht with a dollop of cream topped by dill in front of an old man, the only diner at Le Zakouski, then jerked her thumb to the back. Aimée followed her into a narrow galley kitchen where an old woman wearing a babushka chopped onions.

“Cigarette break,” Marevna said.

The woman, her eyes tearing, nodded without looking up.

Marevna lit a Sobranie from a black box and offered Aimée one. Tempted, she glanced at the gold band, the pink paper. She figured she deserved it. One drag wouldn’t kill her.

Marevna took a long drag then passed it to Aimée. “Finish it.”

The jolt hit her lungs and her brain at the same time. A moment of clarity. Then she wished she hadn’t.

“So important but you forget last night?” Marevna’s pink-lipsticked mouth turned down.

Like she could have helped it?

“Bad men, Marevna. Better you don’t know.”

Marevna took one look at her and nodded. “Right. I don’t want to. But what’s this so urgent?”

Aimée stubbed out the Sobranie and handed her the sealed envelope. “First we need to steam it open.”

Back in the kitchen, Aimée held the envelope over the steaming pot of borscht on the stove. She wondered if it was worth using this short time she had for Marevna to listen to the recording she’d made of the diva and Tatyana. Probably just champagne-fueled ramblings. She decided against it.

The old babushka kept slicing onions, tears trailing down her wrinkled cheeks. The smell of dill and alcohol emanated from a gray-haired man snoring on a stool by the pantry.

“Who’s he?” Aimée asked.

“Lana’s uncle. Never called you, did he?”

Aimée shook her head, careful to keep her fingers away from the steam as she moved the envelope flap back and forth over it. “The old Trotskyist. Guess he didn’t have much to say.”

“But he did,” Marevna said. “He knew that Yuri. Kept saying old Trotskyists never die, they just go underground. Or into the government.”

What did that mean? “Care to enlighten me?”

Marevna reached above the ledge near a set of dusty red Russian nesting dolls. Pulled out a newspaper, Socialist Daily, dated November of last year.

“He never sober very long, but he want to show you this,” Marevna said. “Said Trotsky group met underground at Saint Anne’s hospital during the war.”

That wouldn’t help her. “I’m interested in the seventies.”

“The operating room functioned in the bomb shelter then. One of the orderlies was a Trotskyist and a Jew. He hid there—many others, too. Trotskyists kept meeting there after liberation. Still do, as far as he knows. Said to tell you.”

Taped to the back of the envelope with yellowed cellophane tape was a note.

“What’s this note say, Marevna?”

“Lenin left in 1912 in hurry to Zurich. Entrust—that’s how you say?—to him, Piotr. Made him swear on his mother’s life never open or show this to anyone. Lenin say keep for me.” The edges of the envelope flap curled up and Aimée pulled it away from the steam. Everything smelled like borscht here; no doubt her jacket would reek.

“Can you read this and give me the gist of it?”

“Gist?”

“A quick summary.” Aimée slipped two hundred francs in Marevna’s apron pocket. “I’m in a hurry.”

“Da.” Marevna read and nodded. “On envelope say, ‘In case I die.’ ”

Inside was a single sheet of blue paper. Marevna held the page to the light above the stove. Paused. “November 14, 1910. Very old-fashion Cyrillic. Words we don’t use anymore.”

Marevna read, then reread, her brow furrowed. Two long minutes. “Letter, how you say, intime? Private between man to a woman.”

“A love letter?”

A blush spread over Marevna’s face. This modern girl was embarrassed by an ancient love letter?

“Go ahead, Marevna.”

“Much passion. Full of longing, wants to smell her on his fingers, feel her skin on his skin.… He aches that he won’t see her again. Not sure he’s doing right thing … but.…” Marevna’s breath caught. “He loves this woman. Begs her to understand. He’s consumed, thinks of her every minute. But he must do what he said. No other choice but forget his … how you say? Doubts. Forget his doubts.”

“Doubts?” Aimée said. Huppert’s words came back to her.

“This part—it’s not clear.” Marevna bit her lip. “Something how his beliefs, the lies, worth the price, the sacrifice. Nothing holds him back now.” Marevna’s voice quivered. “She’s left him.”

And by this hot stove in the back kitchen, Aimée sensed a presence. A spirit. As if the soul released from this missive after eighty years now hovered and breathed in their midst.

“We say a passion that shakes the tree roots,” Marevna said, “happens once in a life. Makes the pain worthwhile.”

Aimée knew there was an equivalent expression in French but couldn’t remember it.

Marevna’s hand shook. She pointed to the signature on the letter. “Vladimir.”

Aimée gasped. “You mean … Vladimir Lenin wrote this? That’s his handwriting?”

Shaken, Marevna leaned against the dishes.

Proof of what Huppert had intimated. Modigliani painted Lenin in love, a man caught between his lover, his comrade-wife, his political aspirations, his theories, his doubts before he sacrificed ideals to fanaticism.

“But who was this woman?” Marevna patted the letter, which she now held like a precious object away from the pot of borscht. “There’s no name.”

“A Russian woman whose role faded long ago,” Aimée said. “Does it matter? She played her part in history and left. He led the Revolution, changed the world.”

“No one will believe this,” Marevna said, her eyes wide.

“I thought Russians were romantics, souls as deep as Lake Baikal, wide as the steppes,” Aimée said. “All those things from Tolstoy. He wrote in French, Marevna. We read him in school.”

“No one wants to believe this. This is dangerous, Aimée.” Marevna glanced at the babushka. “Stone deaf. She refuses hearing aid. But him.…” She jerked her thumb at the snoring old Trotskyist. “Trouble.” Her mouth pursed. “Lenin’s still an icon. Old people, tourists line up all day in snow in Red Square … hours to see his mummy. He is myth, but they still must believe in myth.”

Aimée watched Marevna. “Does it bother you knowing he’s not the Lenin you thought he was?”

“Phfft.” She handed the letter back to Aimée. Stirred the borscht with a wooden spoon. “In every school we saw big letters: ‘Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.’ ” But Marevna’s eyes brimmed. “Okay. Inside, romantic me think it’s like Casablanca, give up great love. But Lenin was no Rick, no hero. But it would devastate my grandma.”