“Monsieur?”
Over the blue-uniformed officer’s shoulders, Aimée saw Yuri bent over the gushing kitchen sink. His bloody arms were tied with a necktie to the faucet. She gasped. Rivulets of red-tinged water streamed onto the floor, eddying around her boots.
The first flic rushed to turn off the gushing taps. It took him several attempts to unknot the tie and hoist the old man down. Yuri’s blackened eyes were swollen shut, his face cut and bruised, his distended tongue thick and blue. His hair, plastered to his head, dripped water.
“Mon Dieu.” Aimée’s hand flew to her mouth. “I’m too late.”
“What’s that, Mademoiselle?”
She shook her head. Instinct told her to keep her mouth shut. She wondered who’d tortured the old man in broad daylight.
Trying to piece it together didn’t stop her knees from knocking or the shivers from running up her spine. A familiar floral note—like muguet, lily of the valley—floated in the damp atelier. Her mother’s scent. Then a piercing scream—Aimée jumped as the woman in the mink coat appeared in the hallway, pointing, her face crinkled in horror. The policier called for backup, speaking into the microphone on his collar.
“Take your neighbor outside, will you?” he said. “We’ll talk to you both when backup arrives.”
Her unlicensed Beretta felt heavy in her bag. A good time to make herself scarce. Guiding the sobbing woman, Aimée sloshed through the ebbing water. Just last night she’d sat here with Yuri. The vodka bottle and glasses were still on the table. But the card she’d left was gone.
Good God, what if the killer had taken it?
A broken chair, waterlogged books, and the armoire on its side showed evidence of a struggle. Had the thieves come back for the painting they hadn’t found last night? Or had her mother? And if her mother was involved in this, who was she involved with—Yuri, or whoever killed him?
Chilled, she pushed that thought away.
Only forty or fifty minutes had passed since she’d spoken with him. It made no sense. Last night his shock over his stolen painting had seemed genuine. Why torture him for a painting already stolen? Why had he called her and changed his mind? Saddened, she thought of her last image of Yuri Volodya, holding her card in his hands. Now she’d never get to ask him any of her questions.
“Just like in the war,” the woman said, her shoulders heaving.
Tense, Aimée put her arm around her. “What do you mean?”
“Standard torture by les Boches,” the woman said. “That’s how they got information from my brother. They tortured him in a bathtub on rue de Saussaies. Left him on our doorstep.”
Aimée only had a few minutes before backup arrived. She and her Beretta needed to be as far from here as possible. “Let me take you home, they’ll want to question us.”
She escorted the woman up her stairs. “You heard Yuri yelling?”
“But you heard it too,” she said.
“Bien s?r.” Aimée needed to keep the woman talking. “It bothered my dog, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying.”
“Who could, unless you speak Russian.”
How did this add up? “You speak Russian, Madame?”
“Les Russes filled the quartier once,” she said. “A generation or two ago, I don’t remember.”
Lining the walls of the stairwell were faded amateurish watercolors of pastoral countryside and villages with canals. Painted long ago on holidays, she imagined.
“My brother painted those,” the woman said, noticing Aimée’s gaze.
Aimée nodded. “So talented, your brother.”
“Then, in 1943, that afternoon, gone.…” Her words trailed off.
Outside, Aimée heard car engines.
Both the woman’s brother and Yuri had been tortured in the same way. A link? Or maybe someone wanted it to appear that way? She’d think about that later. In the few minutes before the flics arrived she needed to pry information out of this woman. “Poor Yuri. He had so little.…”
“ ‘Sitting in sweet butter,’ Yuri said to me,” the woman interrupted, reaching the first-floor landing. She opened her door and hung up her mink coat. Warmth and the smell of apples drifted from inside this atelier, which was similar to Yuri’s. Aimée guided her toward a chair as the woman dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “Bien s?r, his wife’s son, he’s been sniffing around. The type who wants the butter and the money to buy it.”
An old saying of her grand-mère’s. Aimée hadn’t heard it in years. She remembered Yuri’s comment on his daughter-in-law’s cement blinis.
“Mark my words, look to family,” the woman said. “That’s what those crime shows say.”
“What sweet butter?” Aimée fingered her bag’s leather strap. “Yuri won the lotto?”
The woman dabbed her eyes again. Shrugged.
A painting so valuable Yuri had been tortured for it. Did that make sense? Aimée needed to press. This woman might have more information, a crucial detail.
“Mais following his father’s funeral, he acted differently,” the woman said. “Didn’t you notice? After he visited the old Russian nursing home?”
A knock sounded on the door. The flics. Flustered, Aimée took a stab in the dark. “Ah, you mean that painting he inherited from his father, non? Seemed to worry him?”
“Not too much. Talked big after that, don’t you remember?” Her eyes narrowed. “Where do you live, eh? I haven’t seen you around.”
“Juste à c?té,” Aimée said. Time to get the hell out of here. “May I use the ladies’ before we talk to the flics, Madame?”
More knocking.
“End of the hall.”