Aimée hesitated, knowing the more Saj knew, the more dangerous it was for him. But then the Serb had already found his name.
So she told him about her mother. The deadline.
The color drained from Saj’s face.
“We’re installing an alarm system. Now.” Saj picked up the phone. “My friend wires security systems.” He paused. Fingered his beads.
“Did your mother torture Yuri?”
And for a moment she couldn’t answer.
Her own mother, a supposed terrorist gone rogue. Aimée kept coming back to her mother’s scent, muguet, which she had recognized at Yuri’s. That scent that clung to the wool sweater her mother forgot in a drawer. The sweater Aimée slept with until she was ten, when her father discovered and burned it.
Conflicting emotions swirled. Love and pain.
Saj punched in some numbers on his phone. He organized an appointment quickly and turned back to her.
“You ready to answer, Aimée?” he said. “Do you know if it was your mother who tortured Yuri?”
“We’re not exactly close, Saj.” Her hands shook.
“According to Yuri, he ‘owed your mother,’ non?”
“If she brokered Yuri a deal, why murder him?” she said. “The goons see me as the link to her. Bait. But they’re wrong. The Modigliani is the bait.”
“What do you mean?”
The stakes had risen—this threat, the deadline. “We’re all ensnared. I need the Modigliani.”
“Et alors? By what logic?”
“The painting’s my only shot to find her.”
“Does she want you involved? Non, think about why.” Saj blew air from his mouth. “Have you any idea what she’s like now?”
If she’d ever known. Aimée felt a shiver run down her spine.
“And our work, the business?”
“Maxence and I have survived so far,” she said. “The kid scored two contracts yesterday.”
That stopped him. Saj shook his head, his dreads coming loose.
“Good idea to alarm the office, Saj,” she said.
“So Maxence stays as intern?” He pointed to the neat piles of proposals, invoices, the color-coded files.
“René’s star pupil. A go-getter. Brilliant.” Almost too brilliant. “Why not? One thing less for us to worry about.”
Saj sipped. “But there’s one thing I don’t get.”
“Only one?” Right now she was bobbing like a cork in a flooded gutter.
“Old Piotr’s living on charity for twenty years in the Russian nursing home. Why? When he stored a priceless painting in the cellar?”
She’d wondered the same thing. “Piotr’s letter shows it carried a sentimental meaning. He counted both men, Lenin and Modigliani, as friends. He wanted Yuri, his son, to have it. But …” She chewed her pencil. “Could he have sold off other art over the years, then forgotten this one?”
“Forget a Modigliani?”
“Alzheimer’s, or dementia. I don’t know.”
“Who would let him ‘forget’ this if they knew it existed?”
Good point. She doubted Natasha would have understood the painting’s value, with that silly red rock on her finger—wait. What if the ring was real, after all?
She had to put herself back on track. “Say he’d kept this for the son he abandoned. He’s guilt-ridden in his later years, like he writes in the journal.…”
“But would guilt have been enough of a reason to hang onto a valuable painting while he was living in poverty?” Saj interjected. “My grandfather sold his Rembrandt before he gave up his race horses, Aimée. Off-loaded his Picassos to repair the roof. Kept the Rodin to pay for my sister’s debutante cotillon.”
Open-mouthed, she stared at Saj. “I had no idea.”
“And they wonder why I visit only once a year,” he said with a little smile. “Moldy tapestries and crumbling chateaux aren’t my thing. Or those living in the past who expect me to recoup their lost fortune and carry on the family name.”
Saj never talked about his aristo background.
Aimée’s phone vibrated in her pocket. The men who had threatened her last night? Her fingers shook as she hit answer.
“You left a message for Lieutenant Michel Olivant,” said a man’s voice. “He’s en vacances.”
Michel, her contact in the art squad.
“You’re handling Michel’s cases?”
Pause. “I assume you have info on the Cézanne?”
Cézanne?
“I didn’t get your name,” she said, trying to stall. Come up with something.
“Raphael Dombasle.”
Her mind went back to meeting with Michel last year, the photos of him and his unit lining his office. “Of course, Michel’s partner.”
“We work on a team.” His tone was brusque.
“Monsieur Dombasle, we need to talk.”
“Concerning the Cézanne?”
Pause. The clink of silverware, the blare of a horn.
“No Cézanne, eh? Make a report, Mademoiselle,” he said, bored. “I’ve got fifty cases on my desk right now.”
“But this involves a homicide.”
“That’s Brigade Criminelle turf,” he said, businesslike. In a rush. Like all of them. “We’re overloaded with cases, desolé. I’m due at Thirty-Six in fifteen minutes.”
“Thirty-Six,” as they all referred to it, was 36 quai des Orfèvres. But across the street from 3 rue de Lutèce, where the art theft division of the BRB, Brigade de Répression du Banditisme, shared the building with the RG, Renseignements Généraux, the domestic intelligence. Not her favorite people.
Before she could say Modigliani, Dombasle had rung off.
Saj sat on his tatami mat, scrolling through files on his laptop. “The kid’s good, Aimée.” He nodded in appreciation at the neatly stacked work on her desk. “Got us up to speed. Gives me time to work on the new project.”
“René trained him,” she said. “We couldn’t hope for better.”
Saj turned his neck, stretched. “The Serb bothers me, Aimée. I feel disturbed auras.”
“More than disturbed auras, Saj,” she said. “Yet I don’t know what.”