Murder Below Montparnasse - By Cara Black Page 0,36

of national cultural importance,” she said, reaching in her bag. “Not many know of us. We work out of 3 rue de Lutèce.”

At least her contact did. Unless the bureau had moved. Openmouthed, Madame Figuer stared at her.

“Art investigator? In that outfit?”

Aimée noticed a nick on her Prada boots. The pair she’d borrowed from Martine.

“You think we wear uniforms? Forget those crime shows you watch on the télé, Madame,” Aimée said. “Nothing exotic. Our cases involve painstaking investigation. Any detail could lead to recovery.”

Madame Figuer pulled herself ramrod straight. She was about to throw Aimée out the door.

“We work independently, but often in tandem with police,” Aimée said. “Our interest coincides here, but I’m working another angle.”

“Likely story. You ran off.”

Aimée nodded. “I’m undercover. But I shouldn’t have told you.”

“So I should believe that? Show me your credentials, your ID.”

Undercover never carried ID. Too compromising if they were rumbled. But Madame Figuer wouldn’t know that. She pulled a card from her alias collection.

“Ministry of the Interior?” asked Madame Figuer.

“Thefts from cathedrals, state museums. In certain cases we investigate robbery from private collections. But that’s all I can say.” Aimée leaned forward as if in confidence. “I’ve told you more than I should. Yet your brother was an artist. Talented.” She gestured to the watercolors in the hallway. “You of all people will understand. That’s why I came to explain. Enlist your aid.”

Madame Figuer blinked several times. Cheap to use the dead brother? But Aimée had struck a nerve.

“You can’t think old Yuri possessed …”

“A national treasure, Madame Figuer?” she said. “We do.” Suddenly she noticed a wonderfully buttery smell emanating from the kitchen. Her overwhelming hunger, which she’d forgotten in the excitement of the letter, came roaring back.

“Yuri was tortured and murdered for it?” Madame Figueur’s hands shook.

“I’d rather talk here, but we can go to headquarters.”

Madame Figuer adjusted the jacket zipper of her jogging suit, played with the snap on her coin purse. “But I’m late for the market. The melons. Then the plumber’s coming to repair the water damage.”

“We’ll make this quick.” Aimée gestured to Madame’s kitchen.

By the time Aimée had eaten half the plate of Madame Figuer’s fresh-baked crisp almond financiers plus leftover pain perdu, she’d gleaned an outline of Yuri’s movements for the past three days.

“The flics questioned me,” Madame Figuer said, “but then I didn’t volunteer much. Couldn’t. The shock. I took one of my pink pills.”

“Pills?” The woman was elderly but seemed clear and alert to Aimée.

“For my nerves, you know. When I think of Yuri tortured next door … just like my brother was betrayed and tortured in forty-three … it’s all so.…” Her voice trailed off.

Coincidental? But Aimée kept that to herself. Perhaps Madame’s retelling over the years had, like such stories steeped in shame, become unspoken common knowledge?

Madame Figuer shuddered. “Do you think la police will ask me more questions?”

“Possible.” Aimée needed to work fast. “Let’s go back to when you noticed Yuri got ‘in butter,’ as you said.”

According to Madame Figuer, Yuri had borrowed her wheelbarrow from her garden shed four days earlier to clean up his father’s cellar—that was how she knew his father had died. But when he’d returned it, he’d brought her a bottle of wine. “Soon we’ll be celebrating,” he’d said.

Saturday he’d driven his old Mercedes somewhere with Damien Perret, the young long-haired man from the printing shop on rue de Châtillon. A nice boy, she added, in spite of his radical politics, but then everyone’s young once, non? Yuri’s stepson, Oleg, visited in the afternoon.

But of last night’s accident she knew nothing, having stayed at her sister’s. She’d returned this morning to a flood in her apartment and loud voices from his open window across the courtyard wall.

Aimée thought back to earlier that morning; she’d been at the morgue when Yuri had left that message. Not much later, he called to take back his words. After contact with her mother? An acid taste filled her mouth. She took a deep breath. “Did you hear a woman’s voice?”

Madame Figuer shook her head.

“Didn’t you say Russian before?”

She shook her head again. “Thought so at first, but no, that I’d recognize,” she said. “The quartier used to be full of them. Thick with artists, too. Giacometti used to live here. He was like a stick man, the wild hair.…”

More stories of the past?

Madame Figuer gave a little sigh. “Everything’s changed. So different now.”

Aimée compiled a list of everyone Madame Figuer mentioned. Oleg—at the top of the list—wasn’t answering