Murder Below Montparnasse - By Cara Black Page 0,29
samovar. She passed Aimée a steaming cup of tea with a cube of sugar. “Suck. Like this.”
Aimée followed suit, propping the cube between her tongue and teeth as Natasha did. The Kusmi Russian tea trickled down her throat like a sweet, wet, smoky breath.
Natasha opened a worn scrapbook with yellowed ballet programs, thrust it at Aimée. The last thing she wanted to see.
“Diaghilev worked us hard, let me tell you. Olga, my garret mate, married Picasso, you know. They met while he was designing our ballet,” Natasha said. “He ignored me, thank God, the little toad with a barrel chest. Diaghilev’s buried out in the cemetery. Nureyev too, that upstart. Rudi was charming when he wanted to be, but I heard he was a devil to work with.”
Sad, but Aimée hadn’t come for wistful historical remembrances. The fact that Yuri had been murdered so soon after his father’s death meant something.
“Let’s get back to Piotr’s relationship with Yuri,” Aimée said, setting her cup down. “Wasn’t there a painting?”
“Shhh. Piotr’s on a mission.”
And he wouldn’t be coming back.
“But you must know the code or you wouldn’t be here,” Natasha said.
Best to play along with her. Learn something. “Bien sûr, but Yuri said.…”
“Yuri knows only part of the code. I let him think he understood. It’s all in the letter.”
“Letter?” Aimée took a closer look at the scrapbook. Opened the back pages. “One of these?” Stuck in between were yellowed parchment envelopes with old canceled stamps addressed to Mademoiselle Natasha Petrovsky.
“Not my old love letters.” A flicker of the gamine crossed her eyes. “Les pneus.”
A code? So far she’d gotten nowhere. And then, wedged in the scrapbook, she saw a letter addressed to Monsieur Piotr Volodya postmarked Paris, March 1920.
Natasha glanced toward the samovar. “More tea?”
“Non, merci,” said Aimée, slipping the letter in her pocket. “Les pneus? I don’t understand.”
“A pity. The two hadn’t spoken in years. But Yuri was in such a rush that day.”
Aimée saw an opening. “That’s why I’m here. Piotr told you his stories, non? He left Yuri a painting from his collection.”
Natasha took another sugar cube between her teeth. A good set of dentures, Aimée figured. Natasha’s gaze wandered. Her neck muscles quivered under thin white skin.
Aimée leaned forward. She needed this old woman to open up. “Wasn’t Piotr instrumental in the twenties avant-garde art movement?”
“Instrumental? Piotr was a penniless Russian émigré from the shtetl. Just a classic émigré story.” Natasha waved her thin blue-veined hands. “In those days, after the Revolution, you’d find a prince driving a taxi.” She sighed. “Piotr served … how do you say it, like a waiter in a bistro where destitute artists—all famous now—paid for meals with their paintings.”
Natasha sounded rational. As if she’d heard this story many times.
“Worth a fortune now, I’d imagine,” Aimée said.
“A franc a dozen then. You call that instrumental in the avant-garde?” Natasha’s tone turned petulant. “Piotr’s supposed to help me. Awful man, late again.” She pushed her wheelchair back. “But you young know the price of everything, not the value. See art as merchandise to trade and sell.”
Surprised, Aimée shook her head. “I don’t understand. Didn’t Piotr pass his painting collection to Yuri?”
“You sound just like Yuri’s stepson.”
Aimée’s mind went back to Yuri’s neighbor’s words—how Oleg the stepson had been buzzing around him like a fly lately.
“Oleg’s no friend of mine,” Aimée said. How could she make sense of the strands running through the old woman’s words? To do that, she’d need to gain her trust. “As you know, Piotr’s on a mission. I came to assist.”
“But the code.…” Natasha’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “I thought you knew.”
The old woman went from rational to irrational in seconds. Would Aimée have that to look forward to if she lived as long?
“There are more letters, n’est-ce pas?”
“Like everything else, I had to keep them for him. They’re somewhere, of course.”
Letters that should have been given to Yuri. Letters that could authenticate the painting, she imagined.
“All his talk about drinking la fée vert,” Natasha said.
La fée vert, the green fairy, the old name for absinthe. Where did that come from?
“Absinthe’s been outlawed a long time,” Aimée said.
“All those drinks at la Rotonde with the artists, poets, revolutionaries, anarchists,” Natasha said. “Montparnasse in the old days. The good old days. As if Piotr knew.”
Aimée started to put things together.
“Tall tales, eh? Or you believed him?”
“Piotr loved recounting how Lenin bounced him on his knee. The way Modigliani wore a red scarf and danced on the table.”