“Don’t I know it, Aimée.” He shrugged. “My mom volunteers me all the time to help idiots who can’t even turn a laptop on. Stupid.”
Maxence didn’t know her American mother was on the world terrorist watch list. Or that she’d gone rogue. Rogue from whom, and why, Aimée didn’t know.
Her fingers gripped the phone. She sensed in the marrow of her bones that her mother was alive. Last month she’d been convinced that figure standing on the Pont Marie was … But what did that have to do with the painting?
Aimée hit the callback button. Busy. Shivers of hot and cold rippled through her.
She heard the fear in that sad, feisty voice of Yuri’s. Serb thugs had threatened him, he’d said as much. She’d found the Serb’s jacket button, seen the blood. The Serb dead before they’d hit him. What in hell was going on and how did it involve her mother?—if it even did.
Some trap? A setup?
The phone rang.
“Leduc Detective,” she said.
“I’ve changed my mind, Mademoiselle,” Yuri Volodya’s voice came on the line. “Forget my message.”
“What? Why?” She tried to make sense of this. “Mon Dieu, you talked to my mother.” Silence on his end.
“You two have history together, don’t you? That squat in the seventies. Trotskyists, non?”
Water rushed in the background. “My damn sink’s flooding. Don’t … come. Too dangerous. Complicated. She doesn’t want you involved.”
Doesn’t want … Her mother was here? So close?
But she was involved already.
“I’ll be right over.”
“Tell me about it!” Maxence was saying. “So if he calls again, shall I tell him you’re swamped with ‘real’ work?”
From her bottom desk drawer, she took her Beretta. Checked the clip to make sure it was loaded. Maxence’s jaw dropped.
“Non, tell him I’m on the way.”
BEFORE EXITING HER building’s foyer, she pulled on a black knit cap, shapeless windbreaker, and oversize dark glasses. She’d been warned three times this morning about Serbs; she’d exercise caution. On the rue du Louvre she scanned the parked cars for a telltale tip of a cigarette, a fogged-up window indicating a watcher. Nothing.
Tension knotted her shoulders. On the side street, rue Bailleul, she unlocked her Vespa and walked it over the uneven cobbles. For a moment, she wondered if she had overreacted. Nothing seemed out of place on the busy rue du Louvre except for a lone squawking seagull on a pigeon-spattered statue. He was far from the water. As lost as she felt.
She shifted into first gear and wove the Vespa into traffic, passing the Louvre. Fine mist hit her cheekbones. She shifted into third as she crossed the Pont Neuf. A bateau-mouche glided underneath, fanning silver ripples on the Seine’s surface. Swathes of indigo sky were framed by swollen rain clouds over Saint-Michel. The season of la giboulée, the sudden showers heralding spring.
Too bad she’d forgotten her rain boots.
Cars and buses stalled as she hit road closures on the Left Bank. Bright road construction lights illumined crews excavating the sewer lines. Street after narrow street.
Frustrated, she detoured uphill, winding through the Latin Quarter, then zigzagging across to the south of Paris, former countryside squeezed between wall fortifications now demolished; past the old Observatoire, two-story houses, remnants of prewar factories leaving an urban patchwork.
Clouds scudded over the slanted rooftops, the chimney pots like pepper shakers over the grilled balconies. Avenues led to tree-lined lanes in this neighborhood, fronting hidden village-like pockets of what her grandfather called “the Parisians’ Paris.”
Her shoulders knotted in irritation. She didn’t have time for this scenic detour. Down wide Avenue du Général Leclerc, through the nodding shadows cast by trees and clouds of chestnut pollen, past the Métro signs and the steps of l’Eglise Saint Pierre de Montrouge. Into a logjam. Horns blared. Protesters chanting “Stop the developers!” and wearing La Coalition armbands blocked part of rue d’Alésia, a street known to fashionistas for designer markdowns. Of course, a demonstration!
Great. No way she’d get through this banner-waving crowd on her Vespa. She downshifted and wove through protesters, desperate for a parking place. It took a good five minutes, then another five until on foot she turned into cobbled Villa d’Alésia. She paused where the narrow lane twisted to the right, past the two-story ateliers. Quiet. A world away from the street protest. Clouds above fretted the cobblestones with a patchwork of light.
Further on, she saw a woman rattling Yuri’s front gate. What was going on? Her stomach churned.
The older woman, in a mink coat over a purple jogging suit, gripped the grilled gate with one hand, beckoned her with the other. “Viens, Mademoiselle.”
“Something wrong? Is Monsieur Volodya all right?”
The woman, her dark penciled eyebrows at odds with her thinning brown hair, stared at Aimée, her mouth pursed. “All that yelling! Disturbed you too, non?”
Nonplussed, Aimée nodded.
“It’s overcast and you wear dark glasses?”
“The optometrist dilated my eyes this morning,” Aimée improvised, removing them and sticking them in her pocket. “But Yuri …?”
“Worried me, too,” the woman interrupted. “His water pipe’s flooding my wall and balcony again. A mess. Not the first time. But I’ve called.…”
The screech of a police car’s brakes coming to a halt in front of them drowned her out.
“You reported this, Madame?” asked the arriving flic, motioning to his partner. Aimée wondered how they’d gotten through the congested demonstration.
“The commotion disturbed her too.” The woman gestured to Aimée. “All this yelling in the middle of the morning.”
The woman took Aimée for a neighbor. She kept talking, but the flic and his partner ignored her. With a sense of foreboding, Aimée followed them inside, her ankle boots sloshing in water. A flood all right.