Murder Below Montparnasse (15 page)

René told him the little he’d overheard.

“Hard to say, but front running involves a kind of insider trading,” Bob said. “There’s different ways to spin it, but say a financial search engine provides trading services. Somehow, for example, they set up access on the mainframe to stall data transmission by a few seconds—that’s a big no-no.”

“I don’t understand, Bob.” René’s cheeks flushed. The beer and Bob’s reaction got to him.

“Did you program a relay and delay code?”

René nodded, worried. “I need to for security and maintenance.”

“But for a financial search engine that uses portfolio tracking and a stock screener, this kind of front run could provide a few seconds’ advantage in online stock trading,” Bob said, playing with his napkin. “So you can manage to get a lower day-trading guarantee. Millions of dollars’ advantage in trading, René. What the hell did they tell you?”

“That’s just it, nothing. I patched and vented the mainframe back door, the usual. Secured the system.”

“Maybe you heard wrong,” Bob said. “Tradelert’s got top investors. Generating a lot of buzz. I don’t know.”

Had he done their dirty work?

Bob paid the check.

“Nothing jumped out at me after I double-checked all systems,” René said.

Or had jetlag clouded his brain?

“It’s your ass, René.”

A
FTER
B
OB DROPPED
him off at the motel, René hung up his suit jacket and trousers on the plastic hanger and stepped into the pink Jacuzzi. He needed to ease the ache in his hip joints after the plane ride. He allowed himself to float in the water, feel the massaging jets, empty his mind.

His head cleared, he played back the algorithms. After he dried off with the largest and thirstiest pink towel he’d ever used, he unpacked his handmade Charvet shirts and hung tomorrow’s suit up in the closet.

At the laminate wood motel desk, complete with Gideon Bible in the drawer, his gaze fell on the empty, dimly lit parking lot outside the window. His thoughts drifted—had Saj garaged and waxed his car? Did Aimée remember the client meeting he’d scheduled, or Miles Davis’s grooming appointment? For a
moment he felt alone. So alone in this room with the king-size bed, so oversize he needed a chair to reach it.

Stop it
, he told himself. He booted up his laptop, stuck in the second prototype thumb-drive he’d neglected to tell Saj he’d borrowed, got ready to work. But that phrase niggled in his mind:
The dwarf’s got no idea
.

Had he heard wrong?

He’d call the Nordic blonde. Test his suspicions.

“Susie, it’s René, sorry to call so late.”

“What happened to you after work?” She almost purred. “I failed in my mission to serve you.”

“But you can redeem yourself, Susie,” he said, envisioning her long legs. “I planned on checking the mainframe again,” he said, “but without remote access I’ll need to take care of that tomorrow.”

“Didn’t you get your token?” A little gasp. “My fault. I forgot.”

The token allowing him remote access to the mainframe. Tokens were guarded like the Holy Grail. Had she really forgotten?

“Security would allow that? I mean, in France we work on-site only.”

“This is the Valley, René,” Susie said, a smile in her voice.

Something bothered him. And he wished he knew what.

“I’m so sorry I forgot, René. You needed it tonight? I’m still here working, and I just ran the systems. We’re all good for tomorrow. Drop by my cubicle before the investor meeting,” she said. “I’ll set you up.
Café au lait
included.”

René imagined her tan legs, long blonde hair, and hazel eyes. Big eyes like Aimée’s. A pang went through him. All these miles away and her scent lingered on his jacket. Chanel No. 5. But he was nothing to her but a friend.

“Don’t worry, René, someone’s here twenty-four, seven if you have questions,” Susie said.

After hanging up, he worked off the backup he’d put on Saj’s thumb-drive. It was smaller and more efficient than floppies or CDs. He hadn’t tested Tradelert’s hardware security—not a priority with the meeting looming tomorrow—but he’d noticed plastic pillars like the ones they have at department stores to stop theft. Saj’s thumb-drive hadn’t set off the alarm.

First rule, as always, he’d backed up all his work. He examined the firewall hole he’d patched—necessary security for the investors Rob stressed would join in the next round of financing, and for the product launch, even a possible IPO.

Secure. Then he examined the back door he’d engineered. Tested the code. All good. He clicked into the safety net backup. And then his fingers froze on the keyboard.

A
IMÉE GRASPED THE
truck door handle and spit at Florent. A sharp slap stung her face.

“You know you want it,” Florent grunted.

“Not what you’ve got.” She twisted her body, wriggled, trying to push him off her. His dirty fingernails clawed her thighs. Raked her skin. Her heart pounded in her ears.

With all her might she shoved him against the window. Kneed him in the groin as hard as she could.

Florent fell back with a loud groan. She scrambled out the driver’s door. Slammed it. Ran.

Two blocks away, beyond Alésia, she stepped into a corner café. Shaking and berating herself, she hurried down the dark wooden stairs to the WC. In front of the soap-splattered mirror, she ran hot water—washed her legs, arms, and face with shaking hands, intent on scrubbing off Florent’s smell, his filth clinging to her skin. She put her head down, took deep breaths until she stopped trembling.

Feeling cleaner, she brushed mascara through her eyelashes. A swipe of Chanel Red over her lips and a spritz of Chanel No. 5 from her bag to complete the repairs. Next time she wouldn’t be so stupid.

Not far from the Montsouris reservoir she found rue Marie Rose, a short-sloped block of six-story stone apartment buildings across from the red-brick church. Quiet after the bustling roundabout of Alésia. But even if she knew what to look for—a
cellar where a Modigliani had been hidden—the idea of entering each building and questioning dwellers was daunting.

Scouting midblock, she found a plaque at Number 34 attesting that Lenin had lived there, and that his apartment was now a museum. From Piotr’s letter she knew Lenin had lived upstairs from him. She’d struck gold.

This route to the painting led her backward, but in some cases, she remembered her father saying, going to the beginning helps you find the end. Feeling more hopeful that she was close to finding another piece of this jigsaw, she entered the light-filled foyer.

Scents of pine cleaner lingered on the brown encaustic-tile walls and the staircase banister’s burnished mahogany. Clean, utilitarian, no frills. The working-class aura remained. For a moment she imagined the Russian émigrés here at the turn of the century.

No answer to her knock on the concierge’s door or any of the ground-floor apartments. Voices came from above. She hoped for better luck there.

At the Lenin-apartment-museum entrance, several people listened to a serious-faced young woman. She wore her brown hair in a bun and wore no makeup. “The father of the Revolution lived here from 1909 to 1912 with Comrade Krupskaya, his wife, and her mother,” the guide explained. “As you will see, every effort’s been made to document his life here and provide as many furnishings of that period as possible. Austere, by our standards today. The Revolution’s architect lived simply, focusing on formulating Revolutionary theory.”

Before Aimée could duck out, she felt a pamphlet pressed in her hand. An image of Lenin shrouded in a greatcoat, saluting Revolutionaries from a train. A heroic man-of-the-people pose.

“Welcome, Comrade, the tour’s just beginning.”

What planet did this woman live on? The Wall came down
in 1989, almost ten years ago. “Sorry, but I didn’t reserve for the tour,” Aimée said. “I wouldn’t want to take another’s place.”

That sounded weak.

“Join us,
s’il vous plaît
.”

Reluctant, Aimée smiled. The guide was no doubt a red-diaper baby from one of the few surviving red suburbs. Once, Paris had been enclosed by the “red belt” hotbed of unions and Communists.

“The new socialist Russia,” she said in a reverential tone, “and the movement that changed the world, were born here.”

A hush descended.

So out of touch, this young comrade. And passé. But the possibility of hearing more about Lenin—the man who’d bounced Piotr on his knee—held Aimée’s interest.

“Comrade Krupskaya wrote in her journals of their life in these two rooms. They held meetings and discussions right here, forging the doctrine.”

The guide gestured to notebooks piled along the burnished orange walls under portraits of Marx and Lenin’s mother. Her voice droned on. Aimée stared at the French translation above Krupskaya’s journal.

A
IMÉE IDENTIFIED WITH
Krupskaya’s frustration at French bureaucracy—some things never changed. She scanned more of the translations. Krupskaya wrote about Lenin’s daily routine of bicycling to the Archives to do research. How on the weekends they joined other émigrés at Parc Montsouris—”a
little Russia,” she wrote, her tone wistful. How she and Lenin kept their bicycles in the cellar, her struggles with the steep cellar steps and the keys.

An article published in 1960 detailed Khrushchev’s visit to Lenin’s museum, or “shrine.” A local seventy-three-year-old resident interviewed for the piece spoke of his childhood:

And it hit her. The cellar the comrade kept her bike in—the old-fashioned key Natasha mentioned—could it be the key to a cellar storage space? The cellar Madame Figuer lent her wheelbarrow to Yuri to empty out? Aimée needed to get down there.

She passed the visitor log with the signatures of Khrushchev and Brezhnev and tiptoed out before the tour guide noticed.

At the concierge’s loge she didn’t have long to wait. A young man wearing jeans set down a Darty shopping bag.

“You’re early,” he said. “My mother’s showing the apartment in twenty minutes.”

“No problem,” she said, improvising. “I want to rent space for my bike. Can you show me?”

“The cellar space goes with the apartment.
Desolé
.”

She sighed. “I’m tired of having bikes stolen. The third one in two months. I need it for work. Really, it doesn’t take much room. I’d share.”

“Talk to my mother.”

She was desperate to get down there. “But I heard an old man’s storage got emptied. My friend helped clean it out, a real mess he said.”

The young man took out his door key. “That’s the truth. Like a dump. Left for years.”

Her ears perked up.

“Gave my mother a real headache, trying to get his son, the old man, to empty it.”

“But I don’t care. Can’t I just see it? You’d really help me out.”

“She’s in charge,
desolé
, not up to me.” He opened the door.

She couldn’t let him go.

“Could I measure it? We’d go for the apartment if I knew I could fit the bikes and an old chest down there.” She smiled. “I love this street. Had my eye on the building. I know I could convince my boyfriend, but …”

“The soccer match on the
télé
starts in three minutes.” He picked up his bag.

Poor
mec
, she hated to push but couldn’t lose this opportunity. “Would you mind giving me the cellar key?” She gave another smile. “Won’t take me but ten minutes. Then I’ll tour the apartment with your mother.”

A sigh, then he reached for something inside the closet. Handed her an old-fashioned, rusted key. “Number C-twenty-four. Watch out for rat droppings. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He wanted to get rid of her and watch the game. Fine by her.

Her penlight beam wavered over the dirt floor in the cellar tunnel. A row of water-stained coved doors with numbers stretched along the cellar tunnel. Only a single naked bulb illuminated the space.

C24 opened with the key and a wave of musty air hit her. What was she looking for? A sign that Yuri had found a Modigliani that had been left here for more than seventy years? All she discovered in the shadows were rat turds and a broken chair on the hard earth floor.

“Mademoiselle?”

A plump black-haired woman shone a flashlight.

“I’ve already rented the apartment.” Her words rolled with an Italian accent. “The storage goes with it. You’ll need to find another place for your bicycle.”

“A shame, but
merci
, Madame,” Aimée said, racking her mind for a way to prolong the conversation. This woman might offer some insight. “Nice cleanup for a space full of seventy-something years’ worth of garbage. Least that’s what your son—”

“
Porca miseria
, don’t get me started,” the woman said. “A health hazard. I could do nothing until that old buzzard’s son finally came. He should thank me, he should. Found a masterpiece, or so he claimed.”

The woman liked to talk. And used her hands, evidenced by the flashlight’s yellow beam waving over the damp stone walls.

“By masterpiece you mean a painting?” Aimée shook her head. “Like a Rembrandt?”

The woman shrugged. “I don’t know. He seemed excited enough. These things happen,
sì?
People find treasures at flea markets, in attics. Down here all that time, wrapped up. Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s worth a fortune, that’s how it always happens. But you only know for sure if you get it appraised.”