Murder Below Montparnasse - By Cara Black Page 0,62

Saj shook his head, his dreads coming loose.

“Good idea to alarm the office, Saj,” she said.

“So Maxence stays as intern?” He pointed to the neat piles of proposals, invoices, the color-coded files.

“René’s star pupil. A go-getter. Brilliant.” Almost too brilliant. “Why not? One thing less for us to worry about.”

Saj sipped. “But there’s one thing I don’t get.”

“Only one?” Right now she was bobbing like a cork in a flooded gutter.

“Old Piotr’s living on charity for twenty years in the Russian nursing home. Why? When he stored a priceless painting in the cellar?”

She’d wondered the same thing. “Piotr’s letter shows it carried a sentimental meaning. He counted both men, Lenin and Modigliani, as friends. He wanted Yuri, his son, to have it. But …” She chewed her pencil. “Could he have sold off other art over the years, then forgotten this one?”

“Forget a Modigliani?”

“Alzheimer’s, or dementia. I don’t know.”

“Who would let him ‘forget’ this if they knew it existed?”

Good point. She doubted Natasha would have understood the painting’s value, with that silly red rock on her finger—wait. What if the ring was real, after all?

She had to put herself back on track. “Say he’d kept this for the son he abandoned. He’s guilt-ridden in his later years, like he writes in the journal.…”

“But would guilt have been enough of a reason to hang onto a valuable painting while he was living in poverty?” Saj interjected. “My grandfather sold his Rembrandt before he gave up his race horses, Aimée. Off-loaded his Picassos to repair the roof. Kept the Rodin to pay for my sister’s debutante cotillon.”

Open-mouthed, she stared at Saj. “I had no idea.”

“And they wonder why I visit only once a year,” he said with a little smile. “Moldy tapestries and crumbling châteaux aren’t my thing. Or those living in the past who expect me to recoup their lost fortune and carry on the family name.”

Saj never talked about his aristo background.

Aimée’s phone vibrated in her pocket. The men who had threatened her last night? Her fingers shook as she hit answer.

“You left a message for Lieutenant Michel Olivant,” said a man’s voice. “He’s en vacances.”

Michel, her contact in the art squad.

“You’re handling Michel’s cases?”

Pause. “I assume you have info on the Cézanne?”

Cézanne?

“I didn’t get your name,” she said, trying to stall. Come up with something.

“Raphael Dombasle.”

Her mind went back to meeting with Michel last year, the photos of him and his unit lining his office. “Of course, Michel’s partner.”

“We work on a team.” His tone was brusque.

“Monsieur Dombasle, we need to talk.”

“Concerning the Cézanne?”

Pause. The clink of silverware, the blare of a horn.

“No Cézanne, eh? Make a report, Mademoiselle,” he said, bored. “I’ve got fifty cases on my desk right now.”

“But this involves a homicide.”

“That’s Brigade Criminelle turf,” he said, businesslike. In a rush. Like all of them. “We’re overloaded with cases, desolé. I’m due at Thirty-Six in fifteen minutes.”

“Thirty-Six,” as they all referred to it, was 36 quai des Orfèvres. But across the street from 3 rue de Lutèce, where the art theft division of the BRB, Brigade de Répression du Banditisme, shared the building with the RG, Renseignements Généraux, the domestic intelligence. Not her favorite people.

Before she could say Modigliani, Dombasle had rung off.

Saj sat on his tatami mat, scrolling through files on his laptop. “The kid’s good, Aimée.” He nodded in appreciation at the neatly stacked work on her desk. “Got us up to speed. Gives me time to work on the new project.”

“René trained him,” she said. “We couldn’t hope for better.”

Saj turned his neck, stretched. “The Serb bothers me, Aimée. I feel disturbed auras.”

“More than disturbed auras, Saj,” she said. “Yet I don’t know what.”

“Then find out.”

Yes, she could do this. She wasn’t lost at sea without René anymore; the office wheels were now running with irritating efficiency thanks to Maxence. And Saj was back on board. Thank God. Now she had to get to the bottom of this so he no longer had to fear vengeance from the Serbian mafia, and so she could clear her guilty conscience about Yuri, who had needed her help and ended up dead—possibly at her mother’s hands.

In her bones she knew that, like a bloodstain, the traces of this tragedy wouldn’t disappear.

DOWN ON RUE du Louvre, she stopped at the newspaper kiosk. “Anything earth-shattering, Marcel?” Aimée handed Marcel, the one-armed Algerian vet, two francs. In return he handed her a morning copy of Le Parisien.

“Et voilà, in the seventh month of the Princess Diana inquiry, the lead