Murder Below Montparnasse

by Cara Black

  It looked like a messy accident, requiring a scooper train especially elevated to clean the electric rail lines. With sad incidents like this, it took forever to reestablish service and reroute the disrupted network. Usually they herded passengers back along the track walkway to the previous station to give room to the emergency crew. But Montparnasse, webbed by four lines, was a vast maze.

  Enveloped in the close, stifling air shared by too many people, she wanted to get out. She had almost pushed ahead in line behind a mother helping her toddler when she froze at a shriek. To the side of the iron steps leading to the platform on the tracks lay a severed arm still in its pinstriped suit jacket.

  Aimée gasped. The arm ended in a bloody clump where the shoulder had been. She averted her eyes too late. Bile rose in her stomach at the metallic scent of blood. Her gaze crept back to the hand, fixated on the pinkie ring. That large stone-like class ring in an engraved mount.

  The driver and scurrying staff attempted to block the track view, to shield passengers from the scene and move them along. Mutters of “heart attack … slipped … quel dommage.” A frisson of fear prickled her neck.

  By the time she mounted the Métro steps to the boulevard, she knew where she’d seen it before. She grasped the pole of an awninged market stall and gulped lungfuls of late afternoon air, hoping she was wrong. Feeling cold and alone in the middle of the bustle of merchants setting up for the evening market, she reopened the envelope. In the photo, Luebet’s hand was clearly visible on the canvas, complete with that distinctive, large-stoned class ring on his pinkie. He wouldn’t be dining at La Tour d’Argent tonight. Nor would Yuri.

  She doubted he’d suffered a heart attack. More like been pushed. Again, she’d been too late.

  Her gaze darted among the shoppers threading the stalls. Whoever had pushed Luebet could be watching her. Whoever had killed Yuri was clearly willing to kill again, and she’d retraced too many of his steps. Head down, she dove into the crowd.

  Tuesday Early Morning, Silicon Valley

  DAWN BLUSHED ROSE-ORANGE over the mountains fringing the bay and over the Buick logo still visible under the Tradelert sign. Five A.M. René, goosebumps running up his arms, had logged into Susie’s terminal using his sysadmin access. Nervous, he scanned yesterday’s protocols. He was drinking instant General Foods International café mocha cappuccino. Even though he’d doubled the packets, it still tasted like brown piss.

  With that bad taste in his mouth, he dug deeper into the admin program to find who held the tokens for remote access. Susie had added him last night at 11:45 P.M.

  He took one more sip. Clenched his teeth and started with her drawers. Manuals, zip drives. Finally he found the envelope marked René with his token.

  He inserted the token, verified his log-in—she’d written in red marker with a heart—and accessed the whole program.

  He’d entered Ali Baba’s cave. The workings, up-to-the-minute reports and scans—everything. With mounting anxiety he wondered why this access hadn’t been provided to him yesterday. It would have streamlined his work, saved him a lot of time. Had Susie forgotten or deliberately left him out? But those overheard words came back to him—the dwarf’s got no idea.

  There had to be more tokens. After some searching in her drawer, he found one. Now he’d clone it and.…

  “Early, eh? Didn’t see you.” A tall figure shadowed the breaking dawn. “Signed in yet?”

  René smiled up at the blue-uniformed rent-a-guard. “They haven’t even printed my business card. I’m René Friant, chief technology officer.”

  “Don’t see your name here, sir.”

  He had to buy time. “You’re sure?”

  René reached down to tie his shoe.

  “Sorry, sir.” The guard came closer. “We’re obliged to check.”

  “Then check the bronze CTO office plate with my name, René Friant.”

  After scanning the empty offices and corridors, René finally found two programmers at workstations. Doughnut crumbs trailed from the youngest one’s sparse goatee. “Like one, my man?” he asked René, offering him a cardboard box assortment.

  René hesitated, eyeing the icing-laden circles of fried dough. “Thought that was flic … I mean, police food.”

  “Cop food—good one, my man. Nice you appreciate fine distinctions in American cuisine,” he grinned. “I’m Brad. Night shift.” He yawned and glanced at the time. “I’m outta here in ten minutes.” Brad swiveled his chair back to the terminal screen and clicked a few keys. “I love French movies. Those shots of the Eiffel Tower and girls in berets. Accordian music.”

  “Mais oui, Parisian girls, striped shirts, berets and baguettes.” We live to be stereotypes, he almost said. Then he thought again. “Brad, before you go, mind doing me a small favor?”

  BEFORE THE INVESTOR meeting, René found Andy at his laptop in the bright fluorescent-lit boardroom of the converted Buick leasing office.

  “All systems go, dude. Brilliant work.”

  Andy’s smile blazed. Charisma, wasn’t that what they called it? He lit up a room, made you feel like the most important person in the universe. Megawatts of charm in a two-piece suit over a Hawaiian shirt and sandals.

  “Afraid there’s an issue you need to know about, Andy,” René said. He gathered his courage. Tried to figure out the right words.

  Andy’s brow rose. “Issue? I checked the system minutes ago, it’s all good.” He shook his sun-bleached surfer curls. “Nerves? That’s it, isn’t it? Your first presentation as CTO. Dude, I get it.”

  René hated disappointing him.

  “My baby … our baby’s hatching into the world,” Andy said. “Be proud, René.”

  He needed to know before the investors arrived.

  “Not proud of this.” René hit keys on Andy’s laptop, opening the program. A few more strokes and René pointed to algorithms popping up on the screen. “This back door allows pre-trading advantage. Like front running. Illegal, Andy. It violates every stock exchange standard.”

  Andy shrugged. “It’s business, René.”

  Shocked, René stumbled against the boardroom table. He didn’t understand. Didn’t want to understand.

  “You knew, Andy?”

  “Forget about it, René. I’ve got the term sheet.”

  “Term sheet?”

  “Everyone in the company wants this term sheet,” Andy said. “It’s our offer from three venture capitalists to invest thirty million. We’ll go public within two months and be worth two hundred million.” Andy squeezed René’s arm. Smiled. “Your two-dollar stock will go to eighty dollars, then twenty million.”

  “Twenty million dollars?”

  Andy winked. “And a lot more in francs. It’s all worth it to us if you can patch and tweak before we launch the product for stock trading. And to keep you here. Okay, dude? We’re good?”

  Astounded, René felt his eyes widen. Serious, Andy was serious.

  “But you can’t think this won’t be discovered,” René said. “Anyone in securities will recognize this scam.”

  Andy gave a big laugh. He slapped René on the back. René felt his world caving in.

  “Don’t worry, we’re talking about a stock trading advantage of a second or two to three seconds. Harder than bullets to prove. The work’s brilliant. Beautiful, dude,” Andy said. “Hell, you did it yourself.”

  Andy pulled out his cell phone.

  “So we’re good, right, René?”

  “I’m not an employee,” René said, shaking. “I came in on a tourist visa. This has got nothing to do with me.”

  “Did you forget the fax you signed and accepted for the CTO position, René?”

  One step ahead of him. The whole time. A bitter taste filled his mouth and it didn’t come from faux cappuccino. Their rush employment offer, the private jet, the stock options lured him here, trapped him. Idiot.

  Andy had used him. A scapegoat to take the fall if he squealed. René doubted Andy needed him anymore
except to keep his mouth shut.

  René’s phone trilled in his pocket. He answered automatically.

  “Ça va, René?” Aimée’s voice an echoey reverberation as the call pinged over the ocean. “Made your millions yet?”

  Little did she know. “I like my millions clean,” René said in English.

  Andy folded his arms, planting himself in front of the door.

  “Not dirty, Aimée,” he added, looking Andy in the eye.

  But he’d lost the connection.

  Tuesday Afternoon, Paris

  I like my millions? Aimée kicked the matted lime-tree blossoms littering Boulevard du Montparnasse’s zebra crosswalk. Not there forty-eight hours and René had gone Zeelakon Vallaaaay all the way. She hit dial back. No connection.

  Just when she needed to talk to someone, throw ideas back and forth like they always had. She needed help reasoning out why Luebet got shoved in front of the Métro.

  No doubt René had the corporate jet at his beck and call. She walled up the disappointment. No time for that now. The sky opened and she ran for shelter in a doorway.

  La giboulée issued an intense pelting shower, then five wet minutes later layers of blue sky appeared. She shivered in her damp boots. Now confident no one had followed her, she hurried along the rain-spattered boulevard to Luebet’s art gallery. Shuttered and dark. He’d been lured out of a meeting and murdered.

  But she couldn’t prove that. The only documented connection between Yuri’s torture and murder and Luebet’s supposed Métro accident was the painting in the photo. Yuri and Luebet were the only ones who could have verified the Modigliani’s existence except whoever took the photo. No doubt the same person who’d stolen it.

  Oleg, the stepson? The dead Serb’s partner, the brother?

  Or Aimée’s mother?

  Whoever had known that Yuri had dined at his stepson’s last night also knew what time to steal it.

  Her cell phone blinked with one message. The insurance company giving her repair quotes for the cars’ damages. She sighed, tempted to ignore this particular problem, given René’s millions and the fact that Yuri was gone. But that wouldn’t make it right.

  Nearby on Boulevard Raspail, inside the AXA insurance office, she stared at the estimated vehicle damages. The base of her spine went weak. She could blow a kiss goodbye to a chunk of the incoming Arident check. Doing the right thing would cost her.

  But she nodded assent, signed the triplicate form and handed it back to the clerk, a young woman all in brown, which only highlighted her already mouse-like appearance. Brown—the new black?

  Now she had another reason to reach Oleg—the insurance money. No one turned down the offer of money.

  She rang the office. “How’s it going, Maxence?”

  “You sound different,” Maxence said. “Something wrong?”

  Should she tell him, confide in this young kid?

  “Just worried about Saj,” she said, crossing Raspail again and realizing she’d left her scooter at the museum. Merde. “Any word from him or the hospital?”

  “Not yet.”

  She walked by the small tree-lined park on rue Campagne Première, which fronted the glinting tiled art-nouveau façade of artist ateliers. When she had been in the lycée, their art teacher brought the class here for a vernissage, an art opening. She and Martine had snuck out to smoke. And gotten caught.

  “Contracts faxed, Aimée. Backups made. Files complete,” Maxence was saying. “Have to go to my evening class now.”

  “Call me impressed, Maxence,” she said. “I’ll finish up.”

  “You’ll 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?

  SHE SAT IN Leduc Detective alone, cocooned with memories, warming her feet at the sputtering radiator. Looking down on her from the nineteenth-century wood-paneled wall was an old photo she’d discovered of her grand-père and Papa as a young boy fishing on the misted quai, a haze of black and white. She was surrounded by ghosts.

  She wondered how she could keep the agency afloat. If she even wanted to. First René gone on to greener pastures. Now Saj injured—if he could even return. She was reduced to counting on a teenage intern, who seemed capable of running her business well enough without her. How long could she even keep him?

  And the deeper sting, this charade played by Melac. To think she’d fallen for it.

  The chandelier’s light suffused her mahogany desk in a soft glow. She stared at her mocha-lacquered toenails on the radiator. Too long since they’d had a touch-up, too.

  Melac kissing the blonde at la Rotonde replayed in her mind. She turned over what she knew about his supposed promotion, which would ease his alimony payments—his hush-hush position linked to the ministry, or so he’d implied.

  Lies. He worked both jobs, by day still a flic, moonlighting as a pimp handler for sports celebrities. It made her sick.

  Nothing new. She’d witnessed men in the force with her father lose their families, gamble, remarry, and moonlight more to pay more alimony. A spiral of debt and divorce.

  Useless to sit and dwell on Melac’s gray eyes, those warm arms around her, his lime scent that lingered on her sheets. The weekend in Strasbourg they’d planned. Never trust a flic, it never worked out.

  She debated, then punched in his number, hating herself. Hated herself more when it went to voice mail. Forget leaving a message—better to tell him off in person. Or not. Expose herself to face-to-face humiliation? Forget it.

  He’d found a long-legged football groupie. Every male’s dream. And she’d thought, what? That he was different?

  She had to admit it, she’d scored another relationship train wreck. She should have listened to that little voice of doubt. So different from Guy, her eye surgeon ex, who’d wanted her to forgo detective work, go suburban and be a doctor’s wife in Neuilly. Giving luncheons. Not that she’d considered it. Or Yves—she’d thought he was “the one,” but his ashes lay in Père Lachaise. She still wore his Turkish puzzle ring on her finger. But here she’d fallen for a flic. Against her own rules. What did she expect?