Murder Below Montparnasse

by Cara Black

  “My craft’s for les connaisseurs, vous savez,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “A certain clientele who appreciate the feel of a hand-bound book, the presentation of prints inside. Salvador Dalí commissioned my work, des gens comme ça.” Apart from his odd sentence structure—as if he translated from Russian construction—he spoke with a pure Parisian accent.

  Under her boot she felt something hard and round. A brass button embossed with LEVI’S. Like the brass buttons on the Serb’s jean jacket. Her heart skipped. “What if this fell off the Serb’s jacket?”

  “That man you ran over?” Yuri’s teary blue eyes widened. “Blame it on the Serb curse.”

  “Meaning?”

  “We have a saying about Serbs: An unfortunate man would be drowned in a teacup. But of that man I know nothing. Nothing.”

  She doubted that. “I think this button came from his jean jacket. Maybe he trashed this place and came up empty.”

  Yuri’s shoulders sagged, and the lines framing his mouth grew more pronounced. A quick scan told her the intruder knew exactly what to look for and where. The leather-bound books lining the shelves were untouched, as was an antique iron book-press on the worktable. An open calendar and notepad lay undisturbed on the desk.

  “Life kicks one in the gut and we’re surprised?” he said. “As if one is the exception, not the rule?”

  Since when do people refer to themselves in the third person, she wondered. An old-world thing?

  “Monsieur Volodya, I’m here to return your money.”

  “Keep it. Find my painting.”

  “Art recovery’s not my line of work,” she said, suspecting he’d mentioned her mother as a ruse. This smelled off.

  “I’ll make up a list, tell you everything.”

  Everything? “Tell me how you know my mother.”

  His left hand trembled slightly. “Please, in my own way. Give me a moment.”

  It was foolish to rush him. Of course he was still in shock. He’d seen a man die, his car damaged, and his home burglarized all within a short time.

  “Damien, my neighbor, the political boy, just brought me back from dinner at Oleg’s place. Oleg’s my stepson, as he calls himself. My wife’s child. Not mine.” Yuri’s voice rose, petulant. “Oleg’s wife served burnt blinis, like cement—can you imagine?”

  Aimée contained her impatience with effort. “Why contact me to protect your painting?”

  “Pour me another.”

  Frustrated, she reached for the bottle. His liver-spotted hand clamped on her gloved one with surprising strength. His confusion was gone.

  “If the Serb left empty-handed,” he said, “someone else didn’t.”

  He knew something. She saw it in his eyes. Suspicion filled her.

  “So you claim a painting is missing, but the man who appears to have broken into your house didn’t have it. Strange, Monsieur. And I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with my mother.” She sipped the vodka. “Why do I feel all this is some ruse?”

  There was fear in his eyes. He downed the vodka. His hand clenched in a fist, his knuckles white. “I’ve been rude to you, I’m sorry.”

  He was wasting time she should have been using to help Saj. “S’il vous plaît, Monsieur Volodya, quit the guessing games.” She was angry with herself for getting caught up in this, for buying into his fishy story just because he’d mentioned her mother.

  “So help me. I know you’re a detective. I wanted to hire you to protect the painting, but now it’s too late for that. I’m hiring you to get it back for me instead.”

  Like she needed to add to Leduc Detective’s workload. They were already drowning. “Like I said, Monsieur, we don’t do art recovery.” She couldn’t resist adding, “You didn’t really know my mother, did you?”

  “Of course I knew your mother. The American.”

  Aimée gripped his hand. “How?”

  “It’s complicated.” He stiffened. “I didn’t know her well.”

  Aimée didn’t know her well, either. Sydney Leduc had abandoned them when Aimée was eight years old. “But you knew her. When?” Hope fluttered despite his vagueness.

  “Of course, she was much younger then. Changed a little, but … it’s been years.”

  Years? Her heart sank. “Where … how?”

  “Now I want to make good on my debt.”

  “Debt?” Why wouldn’t he give her a straight answer? “Is this about the painting?”

  Footsteps crackled over the glass, and a draft of cold air rushed through the atelier. “Monsieur?” It was the flic with the clipboard.

  “Please, Monsieur, how do you know my mother?”

  “Not now.” Yuri put his finger to her lips. Dry, rough skin.

  She’d had enough. She reached into her bag for the francs, about to tell him to forget involving her, when he whispered, “I’m being watched.” He held her hand. “Tomorrow. Wait for my call. I’ll tell you about her.”

  “But I can’t take your money—”

  “Recover my painting.”

  “Monsieur, I need your car registration,” said the flic. He glanced around, noticing the scattered objects. “Your house was broken into as well? Is anything missing?”

  “My wife. She died last year.”

  “Desolé,” he said. “But I’ll need to take down the accident details before I make a robbery report.”

  “No report,” Yuri said, shaking his head. His defiance belied the fear in his eyes. “I’m remodeling.”

  She wondered why the old man was lying.

  The flic’s eyes narrowed. Maybe he wondered the same thing. Yuri pulled open a drawer in the Art Nouveau chest, the most expensive-looking piece in the room. Took out a folder and handed it over.

  As the officer noted the vehicle info, Aimée watched Yuri sit hunched in his chair, his mouth set, the blood clotting on his cheek. She wasn’t sure she believed him about her mother, or trusted him about his missing painting, but she felt pity for him.

  “Let me ask a medic to look at your cut, Monsieur.”

  He waved his wrinkled hand in dismissal. “Now both of you get out.”

  OUTSIDE YURI’S DOOR on narrow Villa d’Alésia her hands shook. A man dead, her friend injured and in police custody, an old man who claimed to know her mother, and now a stolen painting. A sour aftertaste remained in her mouth and it wasn’t from the vodka.

  The day had gone from bad to worse after René’s departure. She wanted this all to go away. To go home, crawl under the duvet. But first she had to help Saj.

  Aimée needed her laptop case and reached for the car door handle. Couscous végétarien dripped all over the back floor.

  “Not so fast, Mademoiselle,” said a balding flic. “I’ll need to search the car. And you.”

  They suspected her now? “Search the car? I tell you, the man ran into us. Not our fault.” She hoped to God that René hadn’t left his unlicensed Glock under the seat.

  “If you’re in such a hurry, better give me the details at the commissariat, Mademoiselle.”

  A “midnight special” in a wire-frame holding pen? Forget it. Weren’t they supposed to offer her a trauma counselor?

  “You call that procedure?” She flashed her détective privé license at him. Time to pull out the big guns. “I’m sure my godfather Commissaire Morbier will be interested, since that’s his dinner all over the floor.” A little lie, as Morbier’s appetite ran to bifteck-frites. But a way to take the focus away from her—and maybe divert it to Yuri. She gestured to the spilled takeout. “Care to explain to him why you think picking up takeout somehow involves me in the robbery of an old Russian man’s atelier?”

  The flic’s mouth tightened. “Morbier’s into couscous végétarien now?”

  So he knew Morbier better than she’d guessed. Oh well, she had to roll with it now. “Part of his new healthier lifestyle.” One could always hope.

  “Robbery of the old Russian, you said, Mademoiselle?” The flic didn’t m
iss a thing.

  She nodded. Let him draw his own conclusions when he saw the blood behind the old man’s armoire. “Too bad you can’t ask the Serb about the robbery. Right place, right time for him to know something.” She shivered, pulling her jacket tighter. “Don’t you find it strange the victim didn’t bleed? There’s no blood here on the street. Do you understand it?”

  “No, I don’t.” He shrugged. “Maybe there was internal bleeding. We’ll know after the autopsy.”

  The tow-truck driver’s horn shrieked a blasting echo off the stone walls. “Finished?” he yelled out the window to a crime scene tech. “Last run tonight. I need to hook up the cars and process them at the yard before it closes.”

  “Take your things, Mademoiselle.” The flic waved to the crime scene tech and hurried ahead. “Open them up, show the officer.” He paused and turned back, his shoe squeaking on the stone. “And the trunk.”

  AFTER FINALLY GIVING her statement, Aimée hurried down the cobbled lane. In the brisk chill, she searched her old address book for the fifth-floor criminal ward phone number in Hôtel-Dieu. She hoped her contact, Nora, a nurse, was working the night shift.

  “Nora’s off,” said an older female voice laced with irritation. “Who’s this?”

  She needed to know Saj’s condition and hated dealing with the notoriously close-mouthed police medical unit. She thought quick. “Traffic division in the fourteenth arrondissement. Any status update on the man injured in the collision fatality on Villa d’Alésia?”

  “But I don’t even have your report yet. Why so eager?”

  “Make my life easy tonight, eh? The medics checked his vitals and took him for observation. Didn’t even list suspected concussion, head injury, whiplash, or superficial injuries. I need a possible diagnosis for my report.”

  Yells and shouts came over the line.

  “We’re busy tonight,” she said, “must be a full moon. I’ll get back to you later.”

  “New regulations,” Aimée said. “We need to fill in all the boxes and I’ve got a few empty. Please.”

  Sigh. “Just a moment. The patient’s here. I’ll ask his doctor.”

  “Parfait.” She had an idea. “I know you’ve got other patients. Put me on speakerphone with the doctor, it’s faster.”

  Another sigh. The click of a button. A rush of background noise. “Doctor Robler speaking,” said a crackling speakerphone voice. “The patient shows possible shoulder muscle and neck injury.”

  Poor Saj. “The patient’s with you? You’re taking him for X-rays?”

  “Bien sûr,” said Doctor Robler, “but after his questioning.”

  Alarm spread over her. “Saj, only give your statement,” she said, hoping he was in earshot.

  “Aimée?” It was Saj’s voice, tired and confused.

  “There’s a robbery involved. Say nothing else until.…”

  A loud buzz. The speakerphone disconnected.

  Monday, 9:30 P.M.

  MORGANE WATCHED HER accomplice, Flèche, peer out the half-open blue shutter. In the moonlight, tendrils of ivy curved over the potted geraniums on the window ledge. Morgane hated working with amateurs. Amateurs with hairy palms, her uncle would say, so lazy they grew hair on their palms.

  Where the hell was Servier? Twenty minutes late already and they didn’t have much time to hand over the goods. Her ears perked up as the gate clicked open below.

  Flèche shook his head. “Just the hipster with a new conquest, like clockwork.” He yawned, running a matchstick under his fingernail. A pigeon cooed from the low rooftop of a two-story house across the courtyard. “Bores me stiff.”

  “That’s a good thing,” Morgane said. Her shirt collar, damp with perspiration, weighed on her neck. She gathered her lank brown hair in a twist and clipped it up on her head.

  “Too quiet. I don’t like it.”

  Wary, she checked the walkie-talkie signal. All bars lit. “Nothing from control. Nerves got you?” Was he worried about the talkative owner of the café-tabac around the corner, where he’d bought cigarettes an hour ago? Like she’d told him not to. Never leave a presence, she’d warned him. “You think there’s a spotter?”

  “I mean it’s dead here,” Flèche said. “Old people, kids practicing piano after dinner, the retiree on the ground floor who never goes out. Spooks me.”

  “She’s agoraphobic.” That was the one Morgane worried about. An insomniac who telephoned her brother in Marseilles every night. A watcher with eyes like a crow’s. “You’re correct. It is dead quiet. The perfect place to hide.” She’d told him time and again. The 14th arrondissement was ideal, residential, a mix of working-class and arty types. “You know, at the turn of the century, the tsar’s Okhrana had more secret agents hidden in this quartier than in Saint Petersburg.”

  “Merde. Don’t start with the history lessons again.”

  “Hasn’t changed much. These people mind their business. Working-class solidarity.”

  He flicked his cigarette ash in the Ricard ashtray, stuck the cigarette back in his mouth and inhaled. In the dark, the redorange glow from the burning tip made his face look ethereal. “A bunch of Commies.”

  She rolled her eyes. The Wall came down in 1989. “Who calls anyone Communists any more?”

  Nearby lay Parc Montsouris, sloping grass hills and the reservoir, just beyond la petite ceinture—the abandoned and overgrown rail tracks edging the old Montrouge quartier. She’d grown up in the clustered lanes of small houses. Generations of her family had been dairy farmers here. Now almost all the farms were gone.

  But she knew the quartier in the marrow of her bones, from the Montparnasse artist ateliers on rue Campagne Première—including famous ones, like Gaugin’s and Picasso’s—where publishing bohos now lived, to the Catacombs at Place Denfert-Rochereau, the only tourist attraction. The screams piercing the night from the psychiatric hospital of Sainte Anne. The nineteenth-century prison of La Santé hunkered scab-like on the fragrant lime-tree-lined Boulevard Arago.

  A good place to lie low. Wait for the drop. And strategic. Access to the Périphérique ring road less than two kilometers away. A quick twenty minutes to the baggage handler connection at Orly Airport. Morgane could almost taste success.

  The walkie-talkie squawked. “Painting arrived?”

  Morgane’s lips pursed. “Not yet,” she responded. Late. Even using the van, he was late for a simple snatch-and-grab. She hit the talk button. “Complications?”

  “Unclear. We’re in a holding pattern.”

  But the cargo plane wasn’t. This was their only chance until next week.

  “Keep me updated.” The walkie-talkie channel went yellow.

  “Something’s wrong,” Morgane said.

  Flèche checked his watch. “I’ll say. He’s not the type to go drinking. But I’m going to find out.”

  Dumb. How in the hell did he ever get the nickname Flèche, “sharp arrow”? Slow and dull were more like it.

  “Wait until—”

  “My cut disappears?” Flèche shook his head. Picked up his shearling jacket.

  “You’ll ruin the plan, Flèche,” she said. “Screw up the timing.”

  “Since when are you my boss?”

  She wished he’d shut up. Hated working with a loose cannon.

  “We all want this to go smooth, perform our roles. Yours is to.…”

  She paused. They both heard the click from the courtyard door below. She put her finger to her mouth. Footsteps padded on the wet pavers, mounted the staircase until they stopped outside the door.

  One knock. The signal. He was here.

  Tuesday Morning

  RAPHAEL DOMBASLE’S NOSE twitched as he studied the small painting in the Montparnasse gallery’s back room. His nose hadn’t twitched like this since he recovered the stolen Renoir in 1996 from a battered suitcase in the Gare du Nord left luggage. But he kept his face blank as he turned to the art dealer Luebet.

  “No provenance? Or certificate of authenticity
, Luebet?” he said, his fingers running over the painting’s carved frame. “So it’s stolen?”

  “That’s why I alerted you, Dombasle.” Luebet gave a tight smile. Long white hair framed his hollowed face and brushed the blue jacket collar of his tailored pinstripe suit. A little phhft escaped his pursed lips. “The seller gave me a verbal agreement to furnish the painting’s provenance, of course, like they all do. But I knew right away.”

  Of course he did. Small figure studies like this rarely came on the market or through an art dealer.

  “But I’m acting in good faith, Dombasle.”

  Dombasle figured Luebet had only alerted him because he’d been unable to sell the painting fast, before Interpol consulted the Art Data Registry. Luebet kept hands in both pots, as the saying went. The kind of informer who delivered when it suited him. Dombasle wondered at the timing.

  “You’d rather a recovery fee than prison. Come out on the right side this time.”

  “I thought we had an agreement, Dombasle.” Luebet’s voice tightened. “We share information, like last time. Why insult me when I follow the law?” Luebet shook his head.

  “You haven’t heard me insult you. But I could.” Dombasle pulled out his tape measure and assessed the small canvas, but it was just a formality. He recognized the painting, which had been stolen during the bold daylight heist of a Left Bank townhouse. This painting was a perfect match, even to the stained signature. An early Berthe Morisot. A jewel of delicate brushstrokes, a charcoal-and-aquarelle study of a mother and child under a garden trellis—her signature subjects. The comtesse had allowed it to be photographed for the glossy architectural magazine’s ten-page spread of her townhouse collection—stupid. When the rich advertised what they had and where they kept it, what did they expect?

  Luebet shrugged. Lit a cigarette and hit the air filter machine, which erupted in a whirr. “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure,” he said. “Exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied, to quote Oscar Wilde. What more can one want?”

  Dombasle watched the dealer expel a stream of smoke. “So the comtesse’s other stolen works.…”