Murder Below Montparnasse (19 page)

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 sûr
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?

“No time for politics, he said. The books he crafted took up his life, even more so after his wife’s death.”

Frustrated, Aimée pulled her scarf tighter against the chill. “Didn’t anything about Yuri strike you as out of the ordinary in the past few days?”

Damien thought. “That’s right, he bought a disposable cell phone.”

“The kind that won’t get traced?” she said, interested. “That struck you as unusual. Why?”

“Yuri hated cell phones. Never wanted one.”

If the murderer hadn’t taken the phone, it would be in the police report.

She sensed more. “What else, Damien?”

“He carried on conversations in the garden, never inside. I asked him why.…” Damien paused, pensive. “Said the fixer wanted it that way.”

“The fixer? Did he explain?”

Again Damien shook his head.

“But you think this fixer is involved with the painting somehow?”

“How would I know?”

Aimée’s phone vibrated. Oleg’s number showed up. A message.

“Letterpress rotor’s jammed,” a voice shouted from inside the printing works.

The last thing she saw was Damien’s shadow filling the doorway before he disappeared without a goodbye.

A
FTER LISTENING TO
Oleg’s message, Aimée took the Métro two stops and emerged into the clear, crisp evening in front of the spotlighted Lion de Belfort statue, the centerpiece of the Denfert-Rochereau roundabout. The bronze lion’s cocked head was wreathed in a wilting daisy chain—a student prank.

To her left lay the shadowy, gated Catacombs entrance.

Her mind went back to another rainy day in early spring—the week after her mother left, when she was eight years old. Her father was working surveillance—like always, it seemed, during her childhood. That day, Morbier picked her up late from school. A trip to the Catacombs, he promised, for a special commemorative ceremony. She remembered the fogged-up bus windows, the oil-slicked rainbow puddles, arriving late to the ceremony in the Catacombs. The old woman describing how the Resistance had used the tunnels as a command post in the days preceding liberation.

As if it had been yesterday, Aimée could still feel her wet rainboots and heavy school bag on her shoulder. See those walls of bare bones illuminated by bulbs hanging from a single wire. Feel that jolting terror at the mountains of skulls. So terrified she wanted Morbier to carry her. But he’d ducked his head under the timbers. Afraid he’d call her a baby, she tried to keep up, tramping through the webbed limestone tunnels lined with hundreds of thousands of bones. So scared, wanting to close her eyes. Wrinkling her nose at the musty dirt-laced odor of the departed. Shivering at the chill emanating from the earth.

“Were you a soldier,
Parrain?
” She’d called him godfather until she was ten. She tugged his sleeve until he slowed down.

“I was only a boy during the war, but my father helped the Resistance,” he said.

“But you said your papa worked on the trains.”

“So he did. But in secret he brought Colonel Rol-Tanguy the rail plans to sabotage the Wehrmacht freight in the Gare de Lyon yards.”

“Did they hide here?” she asked, wondering why anyone would.

Morbier ground his foot in the packed dirt. “You could hide here forever.”

“Weren’t they scared?”

“Scared?” He shook his head. Then his thick eyebrows knit. He opened his mouth to say something. Didn’t.

She watched him, surprised, her fear forgotten now. “Why are you sad,
Parrain?
”

“It happened a long time ago now. People forget.”

“So we’re in this smelly cave piled with bones to remember?”

“Something like that.” He paused, his eyes faraway. “They say if you don’t remember the past, you’re condemned to repeat it,
mon petit chou
.”

She’d taken his big hand with her small one and squeezed it.

Aimée shook off the memories. On rue Daguerre, a lighted pedestrian shopping street, the evening air carried pungent aromas from the cheese shop. Below a whipping awning stood the butcher Alois in his bloodstained apron. He waved at her. She stocked up here on Miles Davis’s horse meat.

This evening, Café Daguerre’s outdoor café tables bustled on the terrace. She picked her way past the crowded tables to the interior, scanning the patrons: locals, middle-aged women, old men with baguettes and chives poking from their shopping bags—drinking an aperitif before heading home for dinner.

For a brief moment, she thought about how she’d intended
to cook more—but since boiling water presented a challenge to her culinary skills, she discarded the thought.

“Un express,”
she said, sitting at the counter and catching the scurrying white-aproned waiter. Next to her a young woman cut into a scallion-fringed croque-madame, on a thick-crusted slice of Poilâne bread. Tempting.

Instead she opened her agenda to the to-do list she’d begun after reading that
Marie Claire
article. Plan, set goals, and prioritize. She ticked off “proposals filed,” “security checks run”—thanks to Maxence—and “butcher’s for Miles Davis.” Under the pending column, she crossed off “René’s tuxedo” and added “autopsy findings,” “fitting for the Dior bridesmaid dress,” “pick up software encrypter.” She also added “Yuri,” “Serb,” and “car repair,” and considered whether telling off Melac warranted inclusion on the list.

No doubt she’d get his voice mail if she tried calling again. She put “Melac” in the future column; she’d deal with him later. Now to Oleg. She’d escaped before the police questioning—he’d be ignorant of the fact that she’d discovered Yuri murdered or that she had Piotr’s letters. Two up on him. Always a good thing when facing a suspect.

“Aimée Leduc?”

She turned to see Oleg, tousled brown hair, corduroy pants and denim jacket—an academic air.

“The
flic
told me you were in the car that smashed Yuri’s Merc,” he said. “Ran over and killed a man in front of his house.”

Belligerent and breathless. Not even a
bonsoir
.

“We had an accident. I’ve filed the insurance claim, everything will be handled. But your stepfather wasn’t hurt.” What’s that to you, she wanted to say, moving away from his crowding elbow.

“Maybe you had something to do with my father’s murder this morning.”

He’d turned the tables. Accused her.

The waiter slid Aimée’s
express
in front of her. “Monsieur, something to drink?” he asked, poker-faced.

Oleg pointed to Aimée’s cup. “The same.” The waiter nodded and moved down the counter.

“Yuri told me you’re the son of his wife,” she said, unwrapping a sugar cube and plopping it in her espresso. “So you have no legal grounds in any of this. I’ll deal with his lawyer about the car.”

“I’m the only family Yuri had.” Oleg drummed his nail-bitten fingers on the counter. “We’ve kept him company since my mother passed. He was lonely, had bad health.”

And you’d been sniffing around for an inheritance, according to his neighbor and Natasha at the nursing home
. Oleg might qualify as extended family, but everything told her to keep Piotr Volodya’s letters in her bag.

“Not that it’s my business,” she said, taking a sip, “but Yuri intimated otherwise last night. Nine times out of ten, it’s the family the
flics
find guilty of crime. I’d keep that in mind before you accuse me, a stranger.”

Oleg stared as the waiter set down a
salade niçoise
in front of a young woman wearing slim, black cigarette pants. Aimée recognized them from the latest agnès b. collection. Eating salad—no wonder she could wear size two.

But Oleg looked hungry. Why didn’t he order one? Cheap.

“Robbery. Murder.” She took another sip. “Your supposed inheritance, I’d imagine, would be their line of inquiry. It comes down to motive.”

“But he was at our house for dinner just last night. My wife cooked his favorite dish.”

“Yuri’s place was trashed,” she said. “He told me a valuable painting had been stolen.”

Oleg stared at her. “So you’re the detective he asked to help.”

He’d put things together fast.

“Quite a coincidence, eh? Running someone over, hitting Yuri’s car.” Oleg leaned closer. “Maybe you set him up, robbed him, and appeared to offer your services with a nice cash reward.”

This man was geting on her nerves. His affected academic air, his insinuations. His incessant drumming on the counter with his nail-bitten fingers. Ignoring café etiquette.

“Funny, that never crossed my mind,” she said, clenching the demitasse spoon. She wanted to slam it on his drumming fingers. “My colleague’s up for possible manslaughter, Yuri’s murdered, and you’re accusing me? Turn it around—say you hired someone to rob Yuri and it backfired?” She paused. “You don’t seem upset over his murder.”