Whoever had known that Yuri had dined at his stepson’s last night also knew what time to steal it.
Her cell phone blinked with one message. The insurance company giving her repair quotes for the cars’ damages. She sighed, tempted to ignore this particular problem, given René’s millions and the fact that Yuri was gone. But that wouldn’t make it right.
Nearby on Boulevard Raspail, inside the AXA insurance office, she stared at the estimated vehicle damages. The base of her spine went weak. She could blow a kiss goodbye to a chunk of the incoming Arident check. Doing the right thing would cost her.
But she nodded assent, signed the triplicate form and handed it back to the clerk, a young woman all in brown, which only highlighted her already mouse-like appearance. Brown—the new black?
Now she had another reason to reach Oleg—the insurance money. No one turned down the offer of money.
She rang the office. “How’s it going, Maxence?”
“You sound different,” Maxence said. “Something wrong?”
Should she tell him, confide in this young kid?
“Just worried about Saj,” she said, crossing Raspail again and realizing she’d left her scooter at the museum. Merde. “Any word from him or the hospital?”
“Not yet.”
She walked by the small tree-lined park on rue Campagne Première, which fronted the glinting tiled art-nouveau fa?ade of artist ateliers. When she had been in the lycée, their art teacher brought the class here for a vernissage, an art opening. She and Martine had snuck out to smoke. And gotten caught.
“Contracts faxed, Aimée. Backups made. Files complete,” Maxence was saying. “Have to go to my evening class now.”
“Call me impressed, Maxence,” she said. “I’ll finish up.”
“You’ll find printouts concerning old man Volodya on your desk,” he said, that Québécois roll to his words. “Did a Damien Perret call you?”
Just the man she wanted to see.
“I gave him your number,” Maxence said. A long pause. “Do you, I mean, want me back?”
Poor kid, on the job by himself all day. Wondering if she’d left him at sea.
“Maxence, consider yourself our intern,” she said. “You’ve impressed the hell out of me. See you tomorrow.”
Aimée checked the cell phone, scrolled through the numbers. Found Damien’s—no answer—and left him a message. She’d give him an earful on his employee Florent after she questioned him.
Gravel had lodged in her damp boot. Great. Leaning against the fence, she shook out the gravel and reminded herself to breathe. Her mind drifted to their lycée art teacher telling the class how in the eighteenth century this had been a country path leading to fields and farmland. How Montparnasse took its name—Mont, or hill, and Parnassus, the mythological home to Greek muses—from the seventeenth-century Sorbonne students who came here to recite poetry. The hill and students both long gone.
Now she wished she’d paid more attention to his stories. She remembered something about cabarets dating from the Revolution, les guinguettes—the dance halls all lieux de plaisir—where the bourgeoisie mingled with the artisans and working class in what had been an outlying quartier. Later, the avant-garde came, attracted by the cheap rents and blossoming Surrealist costume balls. Then, as now, the Breton presence near Gare Montparnasse, the station linking Paris to Brittany, established a Breton culture in the quartier. And the best crêpes in town. She remembered her teacher telling of the marché aux modèles, the street market where artists hired grisettes—women working as seamstresses or milliners—to model. The market had been held at the boulevard’s end before the First World War. Modigliani’s time. The going rate for models to pose was five francs for three hours.
She passed a rain-beaded plaque that listed Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp as one-time residents on the painted geranium-fronted hotel. A former one star, the hotel had now jumped to three stars for the remodeled ambience.
She couldn’t ignore the present: two deaths, a missing Modigliani. Her mother, mysteriously returned after more than two decades? What did it all mean? But she knew in her bones finding the Modigliani would lead to her mother. She had to find it.
And to pick up her scooter. With no taxi in sight, she headed to the bus stop. She pulled on her cap and her oversize sunglasses, walking briskly past the dark cream stone enclosing the misted Montparnasse cemetery.
Five minutes later she emerged from rue Delambre by Café du Dome, where aproned men shucked oysters on ice and waiters added lemons to platters of fruits des mer. She crossed Boulevard du Montparnasse. Patrons grouped on rattan chairs under the red fa?ade of Café de la Rotonde, the fat thirties-style neon letters of its marquee a beacon.
She thought of Piotr Volodya’s faded blue letter in her bag, the letter Yuri never received. Tried visualizing the ascetic Lenin huddled with Trotsky; Modigliani with a red scarf dancing on a table; his model, sloe-eyed Kiki, once dubbed “Queen of Montparnasse.”
But the black Mercedes pulling up in front of la Rotonde brought her back to the present as it ejected a shouting group of footballers onto the pavement. Though not a sports fan, she recognized the drunk soccer star swinging from the Mercedes door. His face was plastered on every sports page on the newsstand. This young man from Marseille was the star of Les Bleus, the national team, who were aiming for the World Cup, which would be held this summer at the new Stade de France.
Traffic snarled at a standstill. Her eye caught on the blonde miniskirted girlfriend and groupies behind the footballer. A dark-suited bodyguard herded them back toward the limo. One of the blondes threw her arms around the bodyguard, kissing him. Aimée’s heart jerked. She recognized this bodyguard who was now energetically returning the blonde’s long kiss.