“My aunt told me I deserved it. I do and now I will.”
“Your aunt’s beginning to smell as bad as your ideas,” she said. “You fired your staff and shut the doors. Old news. Try something fresh, like admitting the truth.”
“Yuri had already sold the painting—it never mattered what the appraiser valued it at.”
Aimée shuddered. “You mean to the fixer?”
Damien grabbed the cell phone, shoved the boxes at her, and ran. But she’d darted back, ready, and batted at him with the typeset roller. He ducked and tripped on the scattered boxes, dropping the phone and the tube, which skittered across the floor. Pieces of the rust-encrusted roller fell apart in her hands. Rust flakes spun in the air.
Damien hobbled to his feet, grabbed the paper-cutter blade from the worktable. “You’re like the others,” he shouted. “You won’t get away.”
The phone lay on the floor. She had to reach René. “Tell Rasputin now, René. Now!” she shouted, hoping to God the phone was connected, that he heard.
Damien swung the paper cutter. Her back was up against the wooden boxes, nowhere to go. Shaking, she couldn’t stop shaking. She scrambled sideways, grasping for the floor—which, in her terror, seemed to tilt away. She heard the blade rip her jacket. Cold air whooshed up her blouse.
An Yves Saint Laurent vintage jacket. Now she was angry.
From one of the boxes by her elbow, she grabbed the first heavy thing her fingers closed on, a letterset bar of sharp, raised metal letters. She pulled it out and whacked him in the jaw. Damien cried out, spun, blood dripping from his cheek. He came back at her waving the blade. Darting left, she swung again. Hit his rib, heard a crack. The metal letters A and S clattered to the floor. But the sharp-edged letterset bar had pierced his T-shirt and was embedded in his chest.
Damien collapsed, moaning in pain. His bloodstained fingers scrabbled to wrench it out. She bound his ankles and wrists with the wire before she pulled the bar out. Then she found the phone.
“René … René?”
“Funds delay done three minutes ago,” he said. “And Rasputin’s one happy camper now.”
“Took you long enough,” she said. “Partner.”
“I’ve missed you too, Aimée.”
AIMéE HEARD THE crow flapping in the next room. Managed to shoo it away from the old woman’s face. She’d leave it to Dombasle to call the health department, but he wasn’t answering his phone. She left the rue de Chatillon address on his voice mail. Let him figure it out. It was time she got out of here.
Going out the way she’d come, she paused on the ledge and took the crackling canvas from the tube. Not much bigger than a large atlas, missing and unmissed for so many years, and now the cause of so much greed and death. In the fading sun, the lilac leaves brushing her arm, she unrolled it.
It took her breath away. A man almost alive looked back at her. The curve of his cheek, the thin mustache, the almond-shaped nut-brown eyes. So vulnerable, so in love, it shone. Warm with an appetite for life, a hunger to experience. Flecked with doubt, maybe, but a fully fleshed-out human being in an ingenious assemblage of deft brushstrokes. The earth tones and still-vibrant green of the jacket, the patched elbow, the hands holding a booklet.
Painted on the back, in quavering letters: M o d i g l i a n i for my friend Piotr.
She took the photocopied letters from her bag, rolled them up with the painting, put them all in the tube, then stuck the tube in her bag. She’d let history decide what it meant.
Friday, 4:30 P.M.
AIMéE WALKED IN the twilight with the Trotskyist paper rolled under her arm, hoping the Sainte Anne appointment would lead somewhere. Did these old Trotskyists stick together somehow? She’d recovered Yuri’s patrimoine from his father, but too late. Melancholy filled her. Yuri had hired her to recover his Modigliani. There were even four thousand francs and change left to prove it. Dombasle … the rest … she didn’t know.
She turned into 64 Boulevard Arago, the walled Sainte Anne psychiatric hospital—la maison des fous, the madhouse, as people called it. Built over the Catacombs and quarries honeycombing the quartier, the hospital was, in the seventeenth century, a farm under the patronage of Queen Anne where les fous worked for their keep. The grounds never failed to make Aimée uneasy. The bars on the rain-beaded windows reminded her of La Santé a few blocks away—another kind of prison. For a moment she wanted to turn around and leave this wet, damp place.
Years ago, she’d accompanied her grandfather here to visit a woman he called Charlotte.
That cold, sleeting February afternoon flooded back to her: Charlotte’s pink peignoir, her little barking laugh, the intense look in her wide eyes; the sad expression on her grandfather’s face, the way he’d told Aimée to smile at Charlotte and act polite; how afraid Aimée had felt when Charlotte stroked her cheek with her bandaged wrist. “Why did we go see that lady, Grandpa?” she’d asked him in the café afterward over a steaming chocolat chaud. He’d shrugged, his shoulders slumped in resignation. “People shouldn’t be forgotten, Aimée. Not even the broken ones.”
The caramel-colored stone pavilions, each named after a writer or thinker, seemed at odds with the mix of nursing staff and hospital-gowned patients who strolled in the gardens and greenery between them. No security cameras, lax supervision. Didn’t they worry the patients would get out? Or maybe the serious cases never saw the light of day.