Murder Below Montparnasse - By Cara Black Page 0,34

A drunk lunatic.

That was when Aimée noticed a photo sticking out from the pages. Much-thumbed, black-and-white and grainy. Three men stood squinting at the sun. One wore a bowler hat, another a scarf, and both towered over the short man between them. Aimée recognized the sign of la Rotonde café behind. And the men. Her heart skipped. She turned it over to see what was written on the back.

André Salmon, Amadeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso, 1916, signed Cocteau.

Stunned, Aimée turned it over again. Studied the faces. Happy.

She picked up an envelope stamped UNDELIVERABLE—RETURN TO SENDER, addressed to Yuri Volodya with an old forty-centime stamp, a café name imprinted on the upper left. From days gone by, when cafés supplied writing paper to their patrons, who could count on twice-a-day postal service. Or la pneu delivery. She stared at the faded blue paper covered with Cyrillic—wondered where a salutation would go. But most of all, whether this involved Lenin.

This was taking too long. Too much payout and no real information. Unless this photo had something to do with the letter. She opened the envelope, handed it to Marevna. “Do you see a date here? Anything about a painting or Lenin?”

“Patient, please. June 2, 1925. This letter say, To my son Yuri.” Marevna’s eyes scanned intently. “Piotr writes about his bistro job when he was twenty-two, in 1920. Just married. About to have him, his son Yuri.”

Marevna read further.

“Piotr writes Modigliani was terribly sick. Tuberculosis. Like a plague, if people knew. Everyone avoided you.”

Like AIDS today.

“Modigliani hid disease, Piotr says, few knew. Or understood him.” Marevna looked up. “He wants Yuri to understand. Here it’s very sad.”

Her voice had changed. Aimée leaned closer, struck by Marevna’s tone. “Go on.”

“Piotr says no one saw Modigliani for several weeks. Piotr worried, so he snuck a pot of cassoulet from bistro to Modigliani’s atelier, on rue de la Grande Chaumière. Found Modigliani in his studio, in a very cold December, burning with fever. Coughing blood. No heat. Only ashes in the grate. He wished he’d brought coal. He saw empty wine bottles, moldy sardines in a tin. Modi’s mistress helped feed him but she was very pregnant, like his own wife. Difficult for her to get around. Modi said—to thank him—for Piotr to take a painting, anything he wanted.”

The resto fell away and Aimée felt the cold, the worry a twenty-two-year-old Piotr knew for this genius, this man who’d been good to him.

Marevna shook her head. “Here I try to quote. ‘Modi was always generous and kind to me growing up. The man lived to paint, to express. A purist. Genius. It pierced me to see him forgotten in this freezing room, surrounded by art he barely made a living from, shivering with fever. But Modi says then I must take the portrait of my old friend, Lenin. The one Lenin commissioned in 1910 but didn’t like.’ ”

“Didn’t like?” Aimée interrupted.

Marevna scanned the page. “An argument. Modi said they’d had some kind of fight. Lenin left for Switzerland and never took the painting.”

Aimée sat up. A portrait of Lenin by Modigliani? Rare, unique, unknown. But if Modigliani painted this portrait as a commission in 1910, before Lenin returned to lead the Revolution, who else knew about this? What did this mean?

“He writes Modi was coughing, coughing,” Marevna continued. “Blood over the blankets but Modi insists to sign the painting to him, ‘For my friend Piotr.’ He writes, ‘Modi said to me, “This means something to you, Piotr. You must have it.” And that’s the last thing he ever said to me. Two days later he died at the Hôpital de la Charité. Next day his mistress, big with child, jumped off a roof.’ Tragic.”

Aimée noticed Marevna’s hands quivering. The paper was stained with a watery blotch of faded ink. As if Piotr had cried while writing this.

So Piotr had a portrait of Lenin painted by Modigliani. A gift from the artist. Unless this letter had been forged afterward to give the painting a provenance. But the feel of the old blue letter, the stamps, the café address told her it hadn’t.

“Is there more?”

Marevna translated on. “ ’That night you were born, Yuri, all I remember was the cold wind on my way to fetching midwife. And your pink, wrinkly face hours later. That’s what I want to explain—this painting belongs to you, too, Yuri. The painting was of Lenin, the man who lived above us, who talked to me when my own papa died. I