Murder Below Montparnasse (34 page)

“I kick your butt first,” Svetla yelled. The door rattled.

No doubt she would. In Svetla’s jeans pocket, she’d found two hotel key cards. But no room numbers.

Aimée let herself out and hung a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign from the handle. Even with Svetla’s racket, no staff would dare open it. One of the key cards opened Svetla’s room. The other must be for Marina’s.

She hit Marina’s number. On the tenth ring, the diva’s slurred voice answered.
“Da?”

“Madame Bereskova, Svetla gave me her phone. It’s important.”

“What you mean? Who is this?”

“What’s your room number? Svetla’s gone and you’re in trouble.”

“You the
Parisienne
shopping girl?”

“
Mais oui
. What’s your room number?”

“I don’t know … Dmitri know.”

“Where’s Dmitri?”

“What trouble?”

Aimée’s ballet slippers sank in the plush carpeted hallway as she tried the key card in the door across the hall. No luck. Her stomach clenched. Three doors down, the key card lit up the green light and buzzed her in.

Vases of lilies, a fruit basket, and several champagne bottles littered the suite. Some full, most empty. Marina, her smeared mascara and black sequin top clashing with her pink flannel pajama pants, sat cross-legged on the bed. She flipped channels with the remote.

“Drink Bollinger? Then we go shopping,
da?
”

“All the boutiques are closed, Marina,” Aimée said.

“Dmitri make them open. He can. Opened Harrods once like for Queen.”

“The way he’s buying a Modigliani of Lenin for his museum?”

Marina drank a flute of champagne. Handed Aimée one. “Lenin, schmenin,” she said, clinking Aimée’s flute with her own.

“Tatyana’s lying to you.”

“So?” Her voice sounded bored.

Aimée took a sip to humor Marina. The toasty fizz slid down her throat. Not bad. “No one’s telling the truth, are they?” She’d neutralized Svetla, but she couldn’t count on it for long.

“Truth is flexible, Dmitri says,” Marina slurred. Eyes unfocused. Drunk. “Dmitri knows. His mother died after trying to have abortion of him. His father crushed in a steel accident when Dmitri is four. Self-made, that’s what you say?”

And ruthless. But she didn’t care to hear Marina’s drunken rant.

“
Alors
, Marina, don’t tell me you trust—”

“Dmitri’s good man,” Marina interrupted. “Some men, they trade wife for new younger skinnier wife. Not Dmitri. Not like the others. No stick-thin bimbo for him.”

For now
, Aimée thought. Marina protested too much.

“We come from same village, worked in same factory,” she said. “Dmitri say Tatyana no good.”

“Dmitri’s right. Tatyana’s using you, trying to make business.”

Marina waved her bejeweled hand toward the closed door of an adjoining suite. “Dmitri make business. Not me.” Marina poured Aimée more pale-gold Bollinger fizz. “I no answer her calls now. Keep me company and we go shopping tomorrow?”

Poor, sad woman.

“Remember the
ELLE
magazine fashion spread I told you about?” Aimée said. “Good news. My journalist friend wants to interview you. For you to come to the photo shoot.” For the first time this evening, she spoke the truth.

“Me? In the
ELLE?
” Marina’s eyes widened. She clapped her hands together like a child.

And then she had an idea. “
ELLE
wants to shoot on location—in the boutiques, and in Dmitri’s museum. Elegant and
Parisienne
, you know.”

Marina laughed. “We find museum, no problem.”

“But
ELLE
wants Dmitri’s museum.”

“Exist on paper.”

“So there is no real museum at all? That’s what you mean?”

“We rent aristocrat’s
hôtel particulier
. Like private museum, okay? Dmitri do it all the time.” Marina leaned over, pulled out an oversize Hermès bag and emptied it on the bed. Grabbed her checkbook. “I write check now.”

A front.

Marina downed her champagne. Giggled. “Me with you, fashionable
Parisienne
. I tell them cash check after tomorrow.” She wrote a figure with a lot of zeros on a check from a Swiss bank account. “Kitchen-sink banking, Dmitri call it. Everything go in and everything come out clean.”

Money laundering. The proof. She’d use this somehow. Aimée grinned back at Marina.

“Dmitri’s next door?” The tall double doors to another wing of the suite were closed.

“Meetings. Always meetings. About paintings and money.”

And his wife too drunk to impress clients. Or he got a bit on the side.

She needed to distract Marina. Get next door. “I bet Dmitri keeps pictures of your children. A proud papa,
non?
Why don’t you show me?”

Marina downed her champagne. “Children?” A sad downturn to her eyes. “Dmitri shoot blanks.”

Did that explain her unhappiness, her drinking, her watching too many American films? Or that he kept to his own suite? Aimée racked her brain.

“Try on the Lolita Lempicka you bought today,” Aimée said. “The one that matches your eyes.”

Marina wove an unsteady path to her open dressing room. “Please to help me accessorize.”

“
Bien sûr
, but let’s start with that.”

Aimée fingered the checkbook Marina had left on the bed, coughed as she tore a deposit slip from the back, and stuck it in her pocket.

While Marina rummaged through clothes in her dressing room, Aimée moved to the double doors. She took a breath and opened them, revealing a narrow hallway. Followed the smell of cigars to a room off to the right.

She paused at the open door. Heard the clink of glasses and voices. Should she chance going further?

“Show them and they’re in,” said a man’s voice. Aimée edged closer.

A laugh.
“Pas de problème
, Hervé,” said a man with a Russian accent. “I have it.”

Two men sat in leather armchairs holding Baccarat tumblers before a fire. The one she figured for Dmitri, on the thin side with short black hair and Slavic cheekbones, wore an unbuttoned pink dress shirt, no tie. A sheen of perspiration glinted on his forehead.

The heat or nerves
? she wondered.

“You said that last time, Dmitri.”

Did he mean the Modigliani?

“As usual, we’ll organize the funds to be available tomorrow at four
P.M
. Pending your bringing our new friends on board. Quit worrying, Hervé.” Dmitri patted the other man’s knee, almost as if reassuring himself. “Do your part.”

Aimée could see Hervé’s profile—prominent nose, graying brown hair that reached the collar of his pinstripe suit jacket. Then he stood. He looked familiar.

Before she could edge closer, the muted sounds of a flushing toilet came from a door behind her. Then a door handle turning. Dmitri’s flunky? She had to get out. Now.

“What are you doing here?” said the chauffeur, emerging from the door and blocking her escape.

Every hair on her neck tingled.

“Madame Bereskova told me the bathroom’s here.”

“Why didn’t you knock?” he said, arms firm across his barrel chest. The unmistakable bulge of his sidearm showed beneath his jacket. The heat and the cloying cigar smoke got to her.

“
Desolée
, I’m confused,” she said, deliberately slurring her words and trying to edge past him.

“Who’s that?” asked Dmitri. He and Hervé stood in the doorway watching her. Aimée felt like a specimen under a microscope, an insect skewered on a pin for inspection.

Her nerves jangled and the champagne rose in her throat. She hiccuped. And again. She cupped her mouth. “Too much champagne.…” She giggled, pretended to stagger. “Madame Bereskova’s so generous, I didn’t drink that much … I must help her with.…” Hiccup. “Accessories for the
ELLE
photo shoot.”

“This the one from this afternoon, Rodo?”

The chauffeur nodded.

“My wife’s stylist. Take care of her, will you?” Dmitri threw an embarrassed smile at the tall French man. “Women.”

Rodo took her arm in an iron grip. He opened Marina’s double doors.

“What you think?” Marina wobbled in strappy sandals, a beige strapless silk tent dress that hit her knees, and a purple hat.

“We need to work on the hat,” Aimée said and turned to Rodo. “Out. Or do you get paid to watch?”

“You don’t fool me,” he said, under his breath. “We talk later.”

Not on your life, Monsieur ex-KGB
. He hadn’t bought her story for a minute. She jerked her thumb with more bravado than she felt to get him the hell out.

With a grunt he left. Aimée locked the communicating door. He’d tell his boss. And at any minute Svetla would break out.

Better work out an exit strategy.

“Where’s Pinky?” Marina’s eyes wavered, unfocused.

“Your dog?”

“Bellman take Pinky for walk, why not back?”

Aimée had to hurry before the bulging-eyed, gold-collared canine returned. She sat Marina down on the huge bed. Rubbed her shoulders. “I’ll coordinate accessories with what’s in your closet, okay?”

But Marina’s eyes closed. The next moment, she was snoring. Aimée had to act quickly.

Near the Hermès strewn on the bed, she found Marina’s high-end phone. A match to Svetla’s but sporting a chrome finish. She exchanged Svetla’s SIM card for Marina’s and put Svetla’s phone—now with Marina’s SIM card—in her bag. From Marina’s walk-in dressing room, she grabbed the first thing she saw—a black trenchcoat. She heard the connecting door’s knob turn. Svetla’s phone rang. Aimée switched it to vibrate. Her damp blouse clung to her neck.

Knocking sounded on the connecting door.

Merde
.

She slipped off her ballet flats to get traction in the plush carpet, opened the door, looked both ways, then ran for her life. Panting, she avoided the elevator and found the exit sign several corridors over.

She couldn’t go out the front—not with the video surveillance, the chauffeur, and Dmitri on the lookout for her. By now one of them was surely calling the front desk to stop her.

Merde
.

She had to find the service elevator or the back stairs. Thought back to the problems the hotel detective complained of on his night security patrol—how the laundry and linen services were behind the elevator banks by his break room instead of in the basement where they should have been—making security sweeps longer than usual.

Aimée was counting on that now.

On the ground floor, she kept to the wall, head down, until she found the door marked
SERVICE
. Inside, industrial-sized dryers hummed and steam escaped from a pressing machine. The woman running the press had her back turned. Sweat poured down Aimée’s back.

She turned to the right, kept going and made the next right. Stacked linen and staff uniforms hung in a wardrobe area.

She pulled off the trenchcoat and jeans and slipped on a white maid’s uniform, then tied an apron around her waist. She pulled on heeled boots from her bag, then stuck the bag with her clothes in a white sack at the bottom of the plastic laundry cart. Wheeled it ahead, her eyes darting for an exit sign. They must have a loading bay to receive supplies.

The woman at the pressing machine looked up. “Where you going with that?”

“I need air, it’s so hot,” Aimée said, fanning herself.

“Take a break but leave the cart down there,” the woman said. “I’ll get to it.…” The service phone lit up on the wall.

Looking for her already.

Aimée pushed the cart around the corner to her left, kept moving, not looking back and praying she’d find the exit. Thirty seconds later, she pushed the cart out the exit and bumped into a man smoking on a loading dock by the dumpsters. A waiter in a long white apron and a black vest.

“She wants you,” Aimée said, eyeing the dim lights of the alley and the street beyond.

“You must be new.” Light reflected on his shaved scalp. He gave her the up and down. “Who wants me?”

“The laundry Nazi,” she said.

“Why?”

“Your apron’s stained,” she grinned. “I don’t know. But she’s ranting.”

“Hold that.” He handed her his burning filter-tipped Gitane and winked. “She loves me. Back in a flash.”

Aimée pretended to take a hit. The minute the door closed, she tossed it, shouldered the laundry bag, and sprinted down the alley. She put every ounce of energy into reaching the next street before the former KGB—or whatever he was called—discovered her ruse in the laundry.

Praying for a return on her taxi karma, she ran through the rain-slicked cobbled streets, the laundry bag thumping against her thigh. The muscles in her calves burned. She zigzagged onto rue Marbeuf and, her chest heaving, reached broad Avenue George V.

The first taxi stopped. “Late for work?” the driver asked.

“You could say that,” she said, catching her breath. “Rue du Louvre at Saint Honoré. Extra if we get there in ten minutes.”

He hit the meter and took off. She hunched down in the backseat, pulled the trench coat over the maid’s uniform embroidered with
Hôtel Plaza Athénée
on the pocket. Marina’s phone vibrated. Six calls. She needed to think.

Two blocks past the Champs Elysées, her own phone rang. Dombasle.

“The buy’s on. Where do I pick you up?” he said, horns blaring in the background.

“I’m in a taxi. Look.…”

“Meet me at Parc Montsouris. Café on the corner of Avenue Reille. Hurry.” He clicked off.

She debated, torn. She needed to get to the office. Enlist the help of Saj—and René, if he was still around. But she couldn’t chance missing the Modigliani.

“Change of plans, Monsieur,” she said, and gave him the address at Parc Montsouris. “Mind closing your ears?”

“Wear these, you mean?” He held up red fur earmuffs.

“Parfait.”

As the taxi sped over Pont Alexandre III, she called Saj. Outside the window, globed candelabra lights lined the bridge, misted in the fog. The Seine below, a dark gelatinous ribbon, caught furred glints of light.

“Before you say anything, Aimée, I found what Bereskova’s angling for at the trade show.”