She believed him.
“In 1900 this was a Russian press employing deaf mutes,” Damien said, his brow creased. “Yuri never let me forget. He insisted we had to continue, stay loyal to the quartier, the workshops. Hire locals. But now commerce has dwindled down to us, Dupont the chauffage manufacturer across the street, and Yuri’s bookbindery.”
A leftover nineteenth-century industrial Paris full of artists, publishers, bric-a-brac traders and craftspeople who saw themselves as the memory keepers of a time now forgotten. Underneath the peaceful and almost timeless look of the place, however, ran dark currents.
But she didn’t need a small business lecture.
“Granted, you’re not selling chocolates,” she said. She had to draw him out. “But the quartier’s still bohemian, cheaper but with a certain Montparnasse cachet.”
“Yuri said that too.” His lip quivered. “I just don’t want to believe Yuri’s gone.”
She needed to connect the dots. If she didn’t press for information, this would go nowhere. Time to appeal to his bond with Yuri. “Damien, this is important. Someone tortured Yuri to find the painting.”
“Tortured?” Damien’s mouth dropped open in horror.
“Madame Figuer didn’t tell you? We found him tied to his sink—beaten, tortured, then drowned.”
Shame, guilt, and something else crossed his face. “Who would have … hurt him like that?”
“Damien, I’d say you’re in danger, too.”
“Me?”
“Do the math,” she said. “Two of the three people who saw the painting are dead. You’re the third, non? You took this Polaroid.”
His intercom rang. Instead of answering he headed to the door. “Look, I’ve got orders to fill.”
“You helped Yuri clean out his father’s cellar, and he found this painting. Then you brought him to the art dealer to see if it was genuine.”
Damien turned. The printing presses chomped in the background. “Not me.”
“Then who did?”
“Why does it matter now?” He shook his head. His shoulders sagged as if in defeat.
“Someone shoved the art dealer in front of the Métro this afternoon.”
She couldn’t prove that.
“You should talk to Oleg,” Damien said. “He took Yuri to see the art dealer.”
Oleg. Her next stop. “Don’t you want to help me? Wasn’t Yuri your friend? Tell me everything you know.”
Damien rubbed his eyes. Hurt and bewildered, he looked out the window into the courtyard. Loaders filled stacks of posters into a camionnette.
He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. Saturday Yuri asked to borrow our camionnette. That one. To clean out his father’s cellar. I offered to help. You know, given his medications and all the times he’s helped me.”
Damien paused.
Aimée reined in her impatience. She knew all this. But maybe there was more.
“All full of garbage, old newspapers,” he went on. “But in the corner we found this small canvas, unrolled it. Amazing the rats hadn’t chewed it. A man wearing a green jacket. On the back it said, ‘For my friend Piotr,’ signed Modigliani.”
Just like in the old man’s letter. “Forgotten in a cellar. But why would Yuri’s father leave it there all these years?”
“I don’t know.”
Damien’s intercom bleeped again. “Shipment’s ready,” said a voice over the pounding of the printing presses. “We need your sign-off.”
Damien shrugged. “I’ve got work to do.”
Aimée followed him through the hall, waited until he’d signed off on the order. He motioned her outside.
The courtyard was dark except for the glow from the warehouse splashed on the wet cobbles. The chomping machines receded in the night.
“Yuri wanted the painting appraised. I told him to keep quiet until he knew the value. Hide it. But bien s?r he had to go opening his mouth, telling people.”
“Like who?”
“Besides his stepson, Oleg? Oleg’s wife, I’d imagine. The concierge who let us into the cellar, an Italian woman. The art appraiser. Then I don’t know who else.”
She needed to prod him more. “Oleg and Yuri didn’t get along, did they?”
“Yuri called me when I was at the hospital with my aunt to give him a ride home from Oleg’s. Oleg and his wife had invited him over for dinner—that was unusual. The dinner was a disaster, he said. They always wanted something, those two.” Damien glanced at the lighted windows of the printing works, checked his watch.
“Whoever tortured him won’t give up,” she said.
“Oleg schemed and plotted with that wife of his behind Yuri’s back,” Damien said.
And he hadn’t returned her call.
“Wanted him to make a new will, he told me. Yuri always complained about the wife, Tatyana. She’s the type who wears faux-designer clothes, always bragging of her connection to some oligarch’s wife. How they went to school together. One of those super-wealthy women with bodyguards, limos.”
Aimée didn’t understand how this fit in. “You’re saying there’s some connection?”
Damien shrugged.
But the painting had been gone by the time Yuri returned from dinner.
“Do you know where Yuri hid the painting?” she asked, trying to feel him out.
“Where he always hides … hid things. So he’d remember.” Damien’s lip quivered. “He usually forgot things. Even to take his medication.”
Yuri Volodya had seemed sharp enough last night, after the initial shock at finding his studio ransacked.
“And this morning when you spoke, did he mention a Serb?”
Damien shook his head and shrugged.
“Did you know when he was younger he was political, a Trotskyist? Did he talk about it? Stay in touch with those people?”
“Yuri?” A little laugh. “Never spoke about the past. Not to me anyway. More apolitical.”
Was that disappointment in his tone?