Murder Below Montparnasse - By Cara Black Page 0,51
went on. “But in the corner we found this small canvas, unrolled it. Amazing the rats hadn’t chewed it. A man wearing a green jacket. On the back it said, ‘For my friend Piotr,’ signed Modigliani.”
Just like in the old man’s letter. “Forgotten in a cellar. But why would Yuri’s father leave it there all these years?”
“I don’t know.”
Damien’s intercom bleeped again. “Shipment’s ready,” said a voice over the pounding of the printing presses. “We need your sign-off.”
Damien shrugged. “I’ve got work to do.”
Aimée followed him through the hall, waited until he’d signed off on the order. He motioned her outside.
The courtyard was dark except for the glow from the warehouse splashed on the wet cobbles. The chomping machines receded in the night.
“Yuri wanted the painting appraised. I told him to keep quiet until he knew the value. Hide it. But bien sûr he had to go opening his mouth, telling people.”
“Like who?”
“Besides his stepson, Oleg? Oleg’s wife, I’d imagine. The concierge who let us into the cellar, an Italian woman. The art appraiser. Then I don’t know who else.”
She needed to prod him more. “Oleg and Yuri didn’t get along, did they?”
“Yuri called me when I was at the hospital with my aunt to give him a ride home from Oleg’s. Oleg and his wife had invited him over for dinner—that was unusual. The dinner was a disaster, he said. They always wanted something, those two.” Damien glanced at the lighted windows of the printing works, checked his watch.
“Whoever tortured him won’t give up,” she said.
“Oleg schemed and plotted with that wife of his behind Yuri’s back,” Damien said.
And he hadn’t returned her call.
“Wanted him to make a new will, he told me. Yuri always complained about the wife, Tatyana. She’s the type who wears faux-designer clothes, always bragging of her connection to some oligarch’s wife. How they went to school together. One of those super-wealthy women with bodyguards, limos.”
Aimée didn’t understand how this fit in. “You’re saying there’s some connection?”
Damien shrugged.
But the painting had been gone by the time Yuri returned from dinner.
“Do you know where Yuri hid the painting?” she asked, trying to feel him out.
“Where he always hides … hid things. So he’d remember.” Damien’s lip quivered. “He usually forgot things. Even to take his medication.”
Yuri Volodya had seemed sharp enough last night, after the initial shock at finding his studio ransacked.
“And this morning when you spoke, did he mention a Serb?”
Damien shook his head and shrugged.
“Did you know when he was younger he was political, a Trotskyist? Did he talk about it? Stay in touch with those people?”
“Yuri?” A little laugh. “Never spoke about the past. Not to me anyway. More apolitical.”
Was that disappointment in his tone?
“No time for politics, he said. The books he crafted took up his life, even more so after his wife’s death.”
Frustrated, Aimée pulled her scarf tighter against the chill. “Didn’t anything about Yuri strike you as out of the ordinary in the past few days?”
Damien thought. “That’s right, he bought a disposable cell phone.”
“The kind that won’t get traced?” she said, interested. “That struck you as unusual. Why?”
“Yuri hated cell phones. Never wanted one.”
If the murderer hadn’t taken the phone, it would be in the police report.
She sensed more. “What else, Damien?”
“He carried on conversations in the garden, never inside. I asked him why.…” Damien paused, pensive. “Said the fixer wanted it that way.”
“The fixer? Did he explain?”
Again Damien shook his head.
“But you think this fixer is involved with the painting somehow?”
“How would I know?”
Aimée’s phone vibrated. Oleg’s number showed up. A message.
“Letterpress rotor’s jammed,” a voice shouted from inside the printing works.
The last thing she saw was Damien’s shadow filling the doorway before he disappeared without a goodbye.
AFTER LISTENING TO Oleg’s message, Aimée took the Métro two stops and emerged into the clear, crisp evening in front of the spotlighted Lion de Belfort statue, the centerpiece of the Denfert-Rochereau roundabout. The bronze lion’s cocked head was wreathed in a wilting daisy chain—a student prank.
To her left lay the shadowy, gated Catacombs entrance.
Her mind went back to another rainy day in early spring—the week after her mother left, when she was eight years old. Her father was working surveillance—like always, it seemed, during her childhood. That day, Morbier picked her up late from school. A trip to the Catacombs, he promised, for a special commemorative ceremony. She remembered the fogged-up bus windows, the oil-slicked rainbow puddles, arriving late to the ceremony in the Catacombs. The old woman describing how