Murder Below Montparnasse - By Cara Black Page 0,47
find printouts concerning old man Volodya on your desk,” he said, that Québécois roll to his words. “Did a Damien Perret call you?”
Just the man she wanted to see.
“I gave him your number,” Maxence said. A long pause. “Do you, I mean, want me back?”
Poor kid, on the job by himself all day. Wondering if she’d left him at sea.
“Maxence, consider yourself our intern,” she said. “You’ve impressed the hell out of me. See you tomorrow.”
Aimée checked the cell phone, scrolled through the numbers. Found Damien’s—no answer—and left him a message. She’d give him an earful on his employee Florent after she questioned him.
Gravel had lodged in her damp boot. Great. Leaning against the fence, she shook out the gravel and reminded herself to breathe. Her mind drifted to their lycée art teacher telling the class how in the eighteenth century this had been a country path leading to fields and farmland. How Montparnasse took its name—Mont, or hill, and Parnassus, the mythological home to Greek muses—from the seventeenth-century Sorbonne students who came here to recite poetry. The hill and students both long gone.
Now she wished she’d paid more attention to his stories. She remembered something about cabarets dating from the Revolution, les guinguettes—the dance halls all lieux de plaisir—where the bourgeoisie mingled with the artisans and working class in what had been an outlying quartier. Later, the avant-garde came, attracted by the cheap rents and blossoming Surrealist costume balls. Then, as now, the Breton presence near Gare Montparnasse, the station linking Paris to Brittany, established a Breton culture in the quartier. And the best crêpes in town. She remembered her teacher telling of the marché aux modèles, the street market where artists hired grisettes—women working as seamstresses or milliners—to model. The market had been held at the boulevard’s end before the First World War. Modigliani’s time. The going rate for models to pose was five francs for three hours.
She passed a rain-beaded plaque that listed Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp as one-time residents on the painted geranium-fronted hotel. A former one star, the hotel had now jumped to three stars for the remodeled ambience.
She couldn’t ignore the present: two deaths, a missing Modigliani. Her mother, mysteriously returned after more than two decades? What did it all mean? But she knew in her bones finding the Modigliani would lead to her mother. She had to find it.
And to pick up her scooter. With no taxi in sight, she headed to the bus stop. She pulled on her cap and her oversize sunglasses, walking briskly past the dark cream stone enclosing the misted Montparnasse cemetery.
Five minutes later she emerged from rue Delambre by Café du Dome, where aproned men shucked oysters on ice and waiters added lemons to platters of fruits des mer. She crossed Boulevard du Montparnasse. Patrons grouped on rattan chairs under the red façade of Café de la Rotonde, the fat thirties-style neon letters of its marquee a beacon.
She thought of Piotr Volodya’s faded blue letter in her bag, the letter Yuri never received. Tried visualizing the ascetic Lenin huddled with Trotsky; Modigliani with a red scarf dancing on a table; his model, sloe-eyed Kiki, once dubbed “Queen of Montparnasse.”
But the black Mercedes pulling up in front of la Rotonde brought her back to the present as it ejected a shouting group of footballers onto the pavement. Though not a sports fan, she recognized the drunk soccer star swinging from the Mercedes door. His face was plastered on every sports page on the newsstand. This young man from Marseille was the star of Les Bleus, the national team, who were aiming for the World Cup, which would be held this summer at the new Stade de France.
Traffic snarled at a standstill. Her eye caught on the blonde miniskirted girlfriend and groupies behind the footballer. A dark-suited bodyguard herded them back toward the limo. One of the blondes threw her arms around the bodyguard, kissing him. Aimée’s heart jerked. She recognized this bodyguard who was now energetically returning the blonde’s long kiss.
Melac.
She stood frozen on the pavement, watching the door shut and the limo pull away down Boulevard du Montparnasse. A passerby snorted in disgust. “The team’s goalkeeper, partying … typical.”
Had her dark glasses deceived her? Melac, former Brigade Criminelle detective, the man she was supposedly in a relationship with, who’d taken a new assignment he couldn’t talk about? Gone incommunicado. The man who just last week had wanted to move in with her?