Murder Below Montparnasse (13 page)

Marevna’s long-lashed eyes blinked. “What your meaning?”

“You do a simple translation. We keep this between us.”

Aimée glanced around the deserted
resto
, the faded photos, the none-too-fresh tubs of orange salmon caviar in the cooler. Doubted Marevna earned much in salary or tips. “This now.” She slid a hundred-franc note over the table. “Two more like this when you finish. You interested or not?”

Marevna’s fingers clenched the hundred francs. “Deal.”

Smart. She understood.

Marevna untied her apron. Pulled out a pen and a notebook from her pocket, opened the rolled papers. A few moments passed. Only the ticking of a clock, the thumbing of pages. A slab of sun warmed Aimée’s arm through the window.

“Maybe I summarize,
da?
You looking for names and family in Russia?”

Aimée didn’t know what she was looking for besides a reason for Yuri’s murder. A clue to this painting. Or whether these old letters even led there. Two letters and several pages of writing on old, browned onionskin paper. Papers she’d stolen from an old Russian ballerina.

Far-fetched, maybe, but she couldn’t help wondering if Natasha had remained lucid long enough to contract the painting’s heist. Or more plausible that Oleg, Yuri’s wife’s son, had heard the stories and put it together. That’s if there was something to put together. She hoped this wouldn’t come back to bite her.

“Why don’t you just read?” Aimée said, trying to control her impatience. “You can write it up later.”

“
Da
, this from 1988.” She scanned a few pages. “He switches back and forth in time. What you say, not linear events?” Marevna read more.

Through the window, Aimée caught sight of a teenage boy straddling his parked motorcycle, smoking. Relishing every puff and blowing smoke rings into the air. She wished her fingers didn’t twitch for just one drag. Marevna was leaning forward, jotting down a word every so often. She was interested now. “Lucky for you. I study psychology.”

Aimée sat up. “Why?”

“Therapist recommends Piotr explain an old letter to his son, to—how you say—make his guilt be less? Make amends for past, yes, that’s better way to say. Do like an exercise in a journal for what he remembers. Write down as much as he
can to flex brain muscles, prevent mental stagnation. For therapy.”

“Like a chronicle of his life?”

“Russians tell stories. That generation, like my great
-grand-mère
, that’s how they teach us about the past.” Marevna sighed. “Wars, siege of Stalingrad, all those things.”

“Piotr was born in 1898,” Aimée said. “How far back in his childhood does he go?”

“First he write about coming to Paris. Hungry, his own father looking for work. His father dying. That kind of thing you want to hear?”

The story was probably fascinating, but she didn’t have time. Aimée thought back to Natasha’s words. “Look for mentions of Lenin. Paintings.” For the first time, she noticed pages had been folded back. “What about here?”

“Lenin?” Marevna shook her head. “Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin?”

“That one,
oui
.”

Marevna flipped through the journal pages, scanning for the name. Aimée, suddenly irritated, wanted to snap at her to be careful with the thin paper.

“Piotr says he the second wave of
Russes
immigrants. I’m the fifth or sixth, depending how you count.”

“That doesn’t seem important,” Aimée said.

“Important you understand background.” Marevna’s face flushed. “Must understand Russian psychology to do with French. Make more sense for you to know.”

Aimée gave a quick, impatient nod.
“Et alors?”

“Russian aristocrats at tsar’s court learned French, spoke it to each other instead of Russian,” Marevna said. “The elite had a love affair with French culture. French reciprocate—you know
bistrot
is a Russian word?”

Aimée didn’t much care.

“Tsar’s troops occupied Paris in 1871, but nobody served
meal fast enough.
‘Bisto, bisto,’
meaning ‘faster, faster,’ they shouted in Russian. It became
bistro
—you know, for fast food.”

It was too much. “Look, can you just check if there’s anything about—”

Marevna huffed. “I try to tell you about why are Russians in Paris. You don’t know this, maybe his stories here don’t make any sense.”

Aimée sighed and nodded. The withered caviar was starting to look delicious.

“This Piotr.” Marevna tapped the pages. “He was poor in Russia. But you know even before the Revolution so many Russian aristocrats come to Paris. In 1900, the Exposition, they settle in little
palais
and give parties for French nobility. Later, Lenin and Trotsky, the revolutionaries, they come to Paris, and the tsar’s Okhrana, his secret service, also comes, to watch them.”

“Okhrana?” The ones Natasha feared. “How do you know all this?”

“Mandatory revolutionary teaching, before the fall of Soviet Union. Everyone my age learned history of our country and yours. We know white
Russes
aristos fled Revolution of 1917—dukes, counts leave everything. Now penniless. Drive taxis—you know about white Russians who drove taxis. Lana, the owner here, her uncle drove a taxi.”

Marevna pointed to a wall photo of a middle-aged woman and older man posing self-consciously in front of the restaurant.

“Then Jews before the Great War. After Great War, POWs and more Jews, who escaped Stalin’s stalag. Stalin say all POWs are traitors. After that, a wave of dissidents in the eighties, and like me, after the Wall tumbled, we came here.” Marevna shrugged. “The old white Russians look at us like trash. Soviet trash.”

Aimée had no idea.

“But essential you understand importance of Lenin in Paris.” Marevna’s voice rose, growing passionate. “This is where he … 
how do you say? Where he formulate his ideology. Like idealist. All his writings, he did in Paris. Cradle of Revolution, we learned. Right here.”

Enough of the Revolution. “Of course, but getting back to Piotr and Yuri. Does he mention Lenin?”

“
Da
. You see.” She pointed to the slanted Cyrillic letters, meaningless to Aimée. “That’s why I’m telling you. After his father died, Piotr and his mother lived on rue Marie Rose.”

“How’s that important?” Aimée wanted to explode.

“Piotr lived below Lenin’s apartment,” Marevna said. “He writes how Lenin bounced him on his knee.”

Aimée nodded. Natasha had quoted that almost verbatim.

“Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, made Piotr
borscht
,” Marevna continued. “Lenin helped Piotr’s mother get work as a cook. His father had died, the mother was so poor.
Da
, here he mentions Lenin,” Marevna said, pointing to a sheet. “He’s writing now how Lenin never had children. Piotr writes about him with affection, saw a human side.”

Aimée watched as Marevna read more, jotted notes. Laughed. “Piotr’s describing his first taste of absinthe, when he’s eighteen. ‘Green like firewater,’ he write. At la Rotonde in Montparnasse, Modigliani buy him drink. Modigliani would sketch in the café for five francs. Then buy drink for everyone.”

Aimée blinked. The ravings of Alzheimer’s or …?

Drink, drugs, women, the legends and myths of Modigliani in Montparnasse. Or Modi, as they called him, rhyming it with
maudit
, cursed. A drunk lunatic.

That was when Aimée noticed a photo sticking out from the pages. Much-thumbed, black-and-white and grainy. Three men stood squinting at the sun. One wore a bowler hat, another a scarf, and both towered over the short man between them. Aimée recognized the sign of la Rotonde café behind. And the men. Her heart skipped. She turned it over to see what was written on the back.

André Salmon, Amadeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso, 1916, signed Cocteau.

Stunned, Aimée turned it over again. Studied the faces. Happy.

She picked up an envelope stamped
UNDELIVERABLE—RETURN TO SENDER
, addressed to Yuri Volodya with an old forty-centime stamp, a café name imprinted on the upper left. From days gone by, when cafés supplied writing paper to their patrons, who could count on twice-a-day postal service. Or
la pneu
delivery. She stared at the faded blue paper covered with Cyrillic—wondered where a salutation would go. But most of all, whether this involved Lenin.

This was taking too long. Too much payout and no real information. Unless this photo had something to do with the letter. She opened the envelope, handed it to Marevna. “Do you see a date here? Anything about a painting or Lenin?”

“Patient, please. June 2, 1925. This letter say,
To my son Yuri
.” Marevna’s eyes scanned intently. “Piotr writes about his bistro job when he was twenty-two, in 1920. Just married. About to have him, his son Yuri.”

Marevna read further.

“Piotr writes Modigliani was terribly sick. Tuberculosis. Like a plague, if people knew. Everyone avoided you.”

Like AIDS today.

“Modigliani hid disease, Piotr says, few knew. Or understood him.” Marevna looked up. “He wants Yuri to understand. Here it’s very sad.”

Her voice had changed. Aimée leaned closer, struck by Marevna’s tone. “Go on.”

“Piotr says no one saw Modigliani for several weeks. Piotr worried, so he snuck a pot of cassoulet from bistro to Modigliani’s atelier, on rue de la Grande Chaumière. Found Modigliani in his studio, in a very cold December, burning with fever. Coughing blood. No heat. Only ashes in the grate. He wished he’d brought
coal. He saw empty wine bottles, moldy sardines in a tin. Modi’s mistress helped feed him but she was very pregnant, like his own wife. Difficult for her to get around. Modi said—to thank him—for Piotr to take a painting, anything he wanted.”

The
resto
fell away and Aimée felt the cold, the worry a twenty-two-year-old Piotr knew for this genius, this man who’d been good to him.

Marevna shook her head. “Here I try to quote. ‘Modi was always generous and kind to me growing up. The man lived to paint, to express. A purist. Genius. It pierced me to see him forgotten in this freezing room, surrounded by art he barely made a living from, shivering with fever. But Modi says then I must take the portrait of my old friend, Lenin. The one Lenin commissioned in 1910 but didn’t like.’ ”

“Didn’t like?” Aimée interrupted.

Marevna scanned the page. “An argument. Modi said they’d had some kind of fight. Lenin left for Switzerland and never took the painting.”

Aimée sat up. A portrait of Lenin by Modigliani? Rare, unique, unknown. But if Modigliani painted this portrait as a commission in 1910, before Lenin returned to lead the Revolution, who else knew about this? What did this mean?

“He writes Modi was coughing, coughing,” Marevna continued. “Blood over the blankets but Modi insists to sign the painting to him, ‘For my friend Piotr.’ He writes, ‘Modi said to me, “This means something to you, Piotr. You must have it.” And that’s the last thing he ever said to me. Two days later he died at the Hôpital de la Charité. Next day his mistress, big with child, jumped off a roof.’ Tragic.”

Aimée noticed Marevna’s hands quivering. The paper was stained with a watery blotch of faded ink. As if Piotr had cried while writing this.

So Piotr had a portrait of Lenin painted by Modigliani. A gift from the artist. Unless this letter had been forged afterward
to give the painting a provenance. But the feel of the old blue letter, the stamps, the café address told her it hadn’t.

“Is there more?”

Marevna translated on. “ ’That night you were born, Yuri, all I remember was the cold wind on my way to fetching midwife. And your pink, wrinkly face hours later. That’s what I want to explain—this painting belongs to you, too, Yuri. The painting was of Lenin, the man who lived above us, who talked to me when my own papa died. I will try to make things up to you since I had to go away.”

Go away? Aimée checked the faded postmark. She made out 1925, the letterhead of Café de la Gare in Marseilles.

“ ‘When you are older, can appreciate, the portrait belongs to you.’ That’s all.” Marevna looked up. “If the painting exists, it’s very sad. Very rare.”

The painting existed, all right. Yuri’s murder attested to that. But who had stolen it last night?

Piotr had written this as a testament, kept this letter for Yuri as an authentication. Yuri, not Natasha, should have had it. Why hadn’t it come to light while old Piotr was alive?

Questions, so many questions.

She figured Oleg, his stepson, knew of the painting’s existence—that was why he’d been snooping around for money lately. Were there others? She’d start with him.

A door slammed in the back. Marevna jumped. Fear flashed in her eyes.

“I have to work. You go, please.”

“But there’s another letter,” Aimée said.

“Not finished yet, Marevna?” came a voice from the kitchen.

“Leave before Lana asks questions.” With a quick motion Marevna piled the papers together.

“Careful. That’s delicate.” Before she could stick them in her apron pocket, Aimée gripped her hand. “Not so fast.”

“But I translate more after work.”

She’d discovered what she needed for now—the rest later. “We’ll meet then,” she said, noting Marevna’s mounting uneasiness. “I might need these.”

Did Marevna see another avenue of cash? A conduit using the Russian grapevine—the tight community—to broker the information? A portrait of Lenin by Modigliani … and the letter to prove it. One needed the other. But then Aimée knew zero about the art world.

A priest’s referral didn’t guarantee she could trust Marevna, but she had to keep her options open. Aimée stuck two hundred francs in Marevna’s pocket. “That’s for now.”

She paused at the Trotsky photo by the door. A piece of the puzzle clicked in the back of her mind. “Lana’s political, a Trotskyist?”

“That’s all so passé,” Marevna said, glancing back at the kitchen. “It’s her old uncle’s.”

“He around?”

Marevna tipped an imaginary bottle to her mouth. “Fond of the drink. Like all that generation.”

Like Yuri.

“Ask him to call me, will you?” Aimée handed her a card and another bill. Yuri’s money. “But this we keep between us,
d’accord?
”