AIMéE POCKETED HER scooter key, smoothed down her cashmere cardigan, and took a deep breath. That hint of spring hovered in the pocket of warm air engulfing the Musée Bourdelle’s open garden. Passing the garden’s massive, ample-figured female sculptures made her think of the kilo she’d gained lately. She wondered if she would have completely let herself go by the time Melac came back from his new assignment—one so hush-hush he couldn’t reveal its nature—if he ever came back. Her life was such a mess lately. She needed to figure out how to cope better with the constant worry over Melac’s safety, the danger he faced every day on the job. Not to mention she’d been neglecting poor Miles Davis. She made a mental note to straighten out her priorities. Later.
Aimée paid her fifteen-franc admission. A yawning member of the museum staff tore her ticket in half at the door. She hurried by the wall history explaining Bourdelle’s apprenticeship under Rodin and his mentoring of Giacometti, continued out through the rose-pink portico and turned left. A brown wooden door labeled ATELIER, then an arrow to LES BUREAUX ADMINISTRATIFS.
Inside she found not an airy, light-filled studio but damp, peeling walls, a rusted charcoal stove, aged wooden beams, and old metal sculpture tools, illuminated only by gray slants of daylight. She shivered, missing the sun-drenched garden she’d just come from. The cross-hatched wood-slatted floor creaked under her heels. Each step echoed, filling her with the sense of having stepped into another time.
“Takes you somewhere else, non?” A man spoke from the shadows. “As if the sculptor will walk in and take up from where he left off on that arm.” The stranger pointed to the half-finished marble figure. “Just as Bourdelle left it in 1929.”
True. She wondered if the dank cold had given the artist chilblains. Not her idea of prime working conditions.
She walked toward the shadow. A guide. “I’m looking for the administrative offices, the director.”
“Keep going.”
Aimée followed the directions, taking her through an ivy-walled walkway leading to a warren of offices. As archaic as the rest of the museum.
“Monsieur Luebet?” said the young secretary. “But you just missed him, Mademoiselle.”
Again, too late.
An older man in a suit emerged from a back office waving a folder. “Luebet rushed off and forgot this. Stick it in the mail for him, s’il vous pla?t.”
Aimée sensed an opportunity.
“Monsieur Luebet’s gone?” Aimée said. “But he said to meet here.”
“And you are?”
Prepared, Aimée pulled out a card with a generic company name. “Lisette. We specialize in packing artwork. Custom crating, shipments.”
The man shrugged. “Something urgent came up at his gallery.”
“Vraiment? That’s a problem, since he’s not answering his mobile.”
“Try the gallery.”
She shrugged. “If he took his car, I’ll never make it in time.”
“You’re in luck, Mademoiselle. Luebet took the Métro today,” the man said. “He complained he couldn’t drive in because of all the street demonstrations.”
“Merci, Monsieur.”
The older man returned to the office, the secretary to the fax machine grinding out papers. Aimée slipped the file under her jacket. She’d hand it to him in person. Forget negotiating the Vespa through a demonstration and the underpass; faster to go on foot.
Minutes later she approached the side entrance of Montparnasse, the octopus-tentacled station with multilevel rail lines—the TGV, the suburban RER, and the deep Métro. Luebet might get off at Edgar Quinet station and walk up to his gallery on Boulevard du Montparnasse, or direct to Vavin. Either route offered a stop with a short walk to his gallery.
Two different lines and tunnels. Which one to take?
Hell, she didn’t even know what he looked like.
Or whether he’d told the truth about an urgent summons to his gallery. But she had to start somewhere. She took the closest tunnel, jumped on the first train—the Number 6 line toward Place d’Italie.
On the softly rocking train, she opened the file. Read the contents; scribbled lines from a curatorial committee on a grid-lined pad. Notes to himself about a Bourdelle sculpture exhibition at his gallery. Behind it a small, metal-clasped manila envelope labeled M—Find it this time.
What did that mean? Curious, she wedged her fingernail under the clasp, opening the envelope to find a wallet-sized Polaroid photo, overexposed and stained by emulsion. In it she could just make out Yuri standing before a small canvas spread on a worktable, and a tall man in a pinstripe suit holding the canvas’s corner—she took the man for Luebet. Both men were half turned toward a painting. Yuri’s atelier window framed them in the background.
The painting leapt out of the blurry detail of the photo. A younger Lenin with more hair—a bicycle in the background—holding a book, a paper? Its vibrancy shone through.
Luebet had been in a hurry all right if he’d forgotten this. Rattled—by what? But this was proof Yuri had shown Luebet the painting. She wondered who had taken the photo.
M—Find it this time. More pieces clicked together in her mind. Uneasiness ground in her stomach. If her hunch about this note was right, Luebet, a respected art dealer, was after this Modigliani, too. Could he have hired a thief himself?
Whom had he rushed off to meet? A buyer? Her thoughts spiraled. M—the thief he’d hired? The one who’d tangled with the Serb, caused his death somehow? She didn’t know how Feliks had died, but she was certain now that his death was directly linked to the painting’s theft. Two people, Feliks and Yuri, had been murdered over this painting. She remembered that white van that had pulled in front of them moments before the Serb fell on René’s windshield—was it connected? She was guessing the Serb had been interrupted in an attempted robbery by whoever had succeeded in stealing the painting, then killed him; but that person would have had no reason to come back and torture Yuri. That meant there were at least two ruthless parties involved in this mess, and still no painting. A web growing more complicated and dangerous—and somehow Luebet was involved.
René, always cautious, would have told her to pull out before getting too involved. Forget this while she could.
By now Luebet might have discovered he’d left this envelope behind. She imagined him irate on the phone with the helpful curator at Musée Bourdelle. Guilt invaded her for a moment.