aren’t related by blood. Or marriage. All Oleg cared about was money. When Yuri boasted about the Modigliani, Oleg and Tatyana buzzed like bees to honey.”
Aimée kept her hand behind her, moving forward with small steps. She needed to reach the wire, or something heavy.…
“Stay back … stay right there.” Damien watched her with glittering eyes.
“Reste tranquille, Damien, we’re just working this out,” she said. “Tuesday morning your aunt went for a CAT scan and Yuri called, just as you told me he did.”
She felt something long, wooden with sharp points. Her fingers traced the sharp edges. Metal. She coughed to cover the sounds of it.
“Damien, I know you meant well.”
He nodded.
“Didn’t you, Damien?”
He nodded again. She needed him to talk. Needed to keep him focused.
“Then tell me what happened,” she said. “I know you’re upset after your aunt’s death. But I need to understand to help you.”
He glanced at his watch. She was losing him.
“Didn’t Yuri want the painting back for the art dealer’s appraisal?” she said. “Then things got out of hand.” She approached him cautiously. “N’est-ce pas?”
“I don’t have time for this.” His voice was different. Harder.
“But you took the time to strangle Yuri with his own tie, to torture and drown him. Why, Damien?”
“You want to know why?” Damien’s voice rose to a shout. “I found the painting, dusty and stuck in the back corner. Yuri promised me whatever it was worth.”
“Of course, Yuri was generous to a fault, he would have shared with you,” she said. “But there’s history behind it. Modigliani gave Lenin’s portrait to Yuri’s father in friendship. His father knew Lenin as a young boy.”
“Generous to a fault?” Damien snorted and grabbed the phone. “I counted on that money. But he’d cut me out. Yuri already had a buyer.”
“So do you—millions from the half-bit oligarch who’s as greedy as you are.” Now more pieces fit. Tatyana was paranoid for a reason—he’d followed her. “You have the Modigliani in that tube to sell via Tatyana.”
“Tatyana?” The muscles in his jaw twitched. “I didn’t mean to.…” His gaze flicked to the corner by her bag.
Alarmed, she stepped forward, for the first time noticing a dark maroon footprint, the red trickle veining the grooved wood floor. The metallic smell of blood she could almost taste. Behind the boxes, under the worktable—a slumped Tatyana, her snakeskin scarf ending in a pool of blood. Her eyes were rolled up in her head.
Aimée gasped.
“She showed no respect for my aunt. She kept yelling, demanding … I never meant to.…”
“Like you never meant to murder poor Yuri?” Aimée said, shaking. “Or shove Luebet on the Métro tracks?” The hypocrite. “But torturing him? The same way Madame Figuer’s brother was tortured, to cover your tracks …?”
“That old busybody? Such a joke, that old story of her brother.”
Cruel as well as unhinged.
“But Yuri turned on me. Wanted no part of La Coalition,” he said. “The bank refused me credit to keep this damned place going. How else can I keep funding the cause, making change happen? Look at Lenin.…”
Lenin? “You think printing posters and making bombs funds a revolution?”
“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