Marevna read further.
“Piotr writes Modigliani was terribly sick. Tuberculosis. Like a plague, if people knew. Everyone avoided you.”
Like AIDS today.
“Modigliani hid disease, Piotr says, few knew. Or understood him.” Marevna looked up. “He wants Yuri to understand. Here it’s very sad.”
Her voice had changed. Aimée leaned closer, struck by Marevna’s tone. “Go on.”
“Piotr says no one saw Modigliani for several weeks. Piotr worried, so he snuck a pot of cassoulet from bistro to Modigliani’s atelier, on rue de la Grande Chaumière. Found Modigliani in his studio, in a very cold December, burning with fever. Coughing blood. No heat. Only ashes in the grate. He wished he’d brought coal. He saw empty wine bottles, moldy sardines in a tin. Modi’s mistress helped feed him but she was very pregnant, like his own wife. Difficult for her to get around. Modi said—to thank him—for Piotr to take a painting, anything he wanted.”
The resto fell away and Aimée felt the cold, the worry a twenty-two-year-old Piotr knew for this genius, this man who’d been good to him.
Marevna shook her head. “Here I try to quote. ‘Modi was always generous and kind to me growing up. The man lived to paint, to express. A purist. Genius. It pierced me to see him forgotten in this freezing room, surrounded by art he barely made a living from, shivering with fever. But Modi says then I must take the portrait of my old friend, Lenin. The one Lenin commissioned in 1910 but didn’t like.’ ”
“Didn’t like?” Aimée interrupted.
Marevna scanned the page. “An argument. Modi said they’d had some kind of fight. Lenin left for Switzerland and never took the painting.”
Aimée sat up. A portrait of Lenin by Modigliani? Rare, unique, unknown. But if Modigliani painted this portrait as a commission in 1910, before Lenin returned to lead the Revolution, who else knew about this? What did this mean?
“He writes Modi was coughing, coughing,” Marevna continued. “Blood over the blankets but Modi insists to sign the painting to him, ‘For my friend Piotr.’ He writes, ‘Modi said to me, “This means something to you, Piotr. You must have it.” And that’s the last thing he ever said to me. Two days later he died at the H?pital de la Charité. Next day his mistress, big with child, jumped off a roof.’ Tragic.”
Aimée noticed Marevna’s hands quivering. The paper was stained with a watery blotch of faded ink. As if Piotr had cried while writing this.
So Piotr had a portrait of Lenin painted by Modigliani. A gift from the artist. Unless this letter had been forged afterward to give the painting a provenance. But the feel of the old blue letter, the stamps, the café address told her it hadn’t.
“Is there more?”
Marevna translated on. “ ’That night you were born, Yuri, all I remember was the cold wind on my way to fetching midwife. And your pink, wrinkly face hours later. That’s what I want to explain—this painting belongs to you, too, Yuri. The painting was of Lenin, the man who lived above us, who talked to me when my own papa died. I will try to make things up to you since I had to go away.”
Go away? Aimée checked the faded postmark. She made out 1925, the letterhead of Café de la Gare in Marseilles.
“ ‘When you are older, can appreciate, the portrait belongs to you.’ That’s all.” Marevna looked up. “If the painting exists, it’s very sad. Very rare.”
The painting existed, all right. Yuri’s murder attested to that. But who had stolen it last night?
Piotr had written this as a testament, kept this letter for Yuri as an authentication. Yuri, not Natasha, should have had it. Why hadn’t it come to light while old Piotr was alive?
Questions, so many questions.
She figured Oleg, his stepson, knew of the painting’s existence—that was why he’d been snooping around for money lately. Were there others? She’d start with him.
A door slammed in the back. Marevna jumped. Fear flashed in her eyes.
“I have to work. You go, please.”
“But there’s another letter,” Aimée said.
“Not finished yet, Marevna?” came a voice from the kitchen.
“Leave before Lana asks questions.” With a quick motion Marevna piled the papers together.
“Careful. That’s delicate.” Before she could stick them in her apron pocket, Aimée gripped her hand. “Not so fast.”
“But I translate more after work.”
She’d discovered what she needed for now—the rest later. “We’ll meet then,” she said, noting Marevna’s mounting uneasiness. “I might need these.”
Did Marevna see another avenue of cash? A conduit using the Russian grapevine—the tight community—to broker the information? A portrait of Lenin by Modigliani … and the letter to prove it. One needed the other. But then Aimée knew zero about the art world.
A priest’s referral didn’t guarantee she could trust Marevna, but she had to keep her options open. Aimée stuck two hundred francs in Marevna’s pocket. “That’s for now.”
She paused at the Trotsky photo by the door. A piece of the puzzle clicked in the back of her mind. “Lana’s political, a Trotskyist?”
“That’s all so passé,” Marevna said, glancing back at the kitchen. “It’s her old uncle’s.”
“He around?”
Marevna tipped an imaginary bottle to her mouth. “Fond of the drink. Like all that generation.”
Like Yuri.
“Ask him to call me, will you?” Aimée handed her a card and another bill. Yuri’s money. “But this we keep between us, d’accord?”
Marevna nodded.
Tuesday Early Afternoon, Paris
AIMéE KNEW LITTLE about art, even less about the art world. But she knew who to ask.
“Lieutenant Olivant?” said the receptionist at the préfecture de police. “He works out of OCSC now.”
She never remembered the meaning behind those acronyms for various police branches. The terms changed all the time.