Murder Below Montparnasse

by Cara Black

  She pushed the hurt aside, determined to get over him. Feeling sorry for herself would get her nowhere. As her grand-mère said, spilt milk doesn’t fill the pitcher.

  She’d start on her list right now.

  Damien Perret’s number was busy. She tried Oleg Volodya again. Only voice mail. People didn’t answer their phones. It made her crazy.

  With a sigh she picked up the printouts Maxence had left and started reading about Yuri Volodya. Engrossed, she didn’t notice the shadows lengthening in the window from rue du Louvre until the phone rang, startling her.

  “Leduc Detective,” she said, reaching for a cigarette in her bag before remembering she’d quit. A glance at her watch told her in three more hours it would be two months.

  “Aimée Leduc? It’s Damien Perret. I’ve been trying to reach you since you came to my.…”

  “Printing works?” And your worker Florent attacked me? But she left that out. She popped a stick of cassis gum in her mouth. “Let’s meet at a café. Say fifteen minutes?”

  A breath of expelled air came over the line. “I’ve been gone all day, we’re still running orders. I can’t leave.”

  “Your deliveryman Florent around?”

  “Florent? I fired him tonight. Why?”

  Good.

  “See you in twenty minutes,” she said and hung up before he could put her off.

  At this time of night the Métro would be faster. She’d finish her reading later. She laced her red high-tops and headed for the door.

  Until the bulge in her coat pocket reminded her to return her unlicensed Beretta to the desk drawer, and leave the old papers in the safe. She felt for her Swiss Army knife stowed in her bag’s makeup kit. Just in case. She double knotted a green leopard-print scarf around her neck and she was off.

  AIMÉE SNEEZED AT the tang of hot oil and ink permeating the printing workshop. Two large presses pounded out colored sheets. With the loud chopping noises of industrial paper cutters, she couldn’t hear herself think.

  “Damien around?” she shouted.

  An older man in grease-stained overalls looked up and hit a lever. He gestured to another white-haired codger to take over the press. She followed him past a stairway leading up to a storeroom, then through a dark wood hallway. He pointed to an open door with a sign: CHEF DU BUREAU.

  Harsh white light illuminated a scuffed wood desk, file cabinets, and streaked glass windows that looked unchanged since the fifties. Banners and posters she recognized from this morning’s demonstration were piled in the corner. The only concessions to the nineties were the desktop computer, fax machine, and laser printer.

  She knocked on the open door. Damien, whom she recognized from after the accident, looked up from his desktop. Bags under his eyes, swollen red lids. He’d aged overnight. She contained her shock at this twenty-something’s haggard appearance.

  “So you’re the one Madame Figuer called about. The art flic?”

  Madame Figuer couldn’t keep a secret. The busybody. On top of that, Aimée had an awkward feeling she’d intruded on his tears.

  “Then you know about Yuri,” she said.

  “I can’t … believe it.”

  Aimée sat on a wooden plank chair and watched him blow his nose with a blue bandanna. He reached for a water bottle and poured two glasses full, his hands shaking. She noticed the La Coalition armband by his computer.

  Shaken over Yuri’s murder?

  “Been gone all day and we’ve got to fill this order tonight before I.…” He took a breath. “Un moment, I’m sorry,” he said, scanning an invoice on his laptop.

  Shaken all right. She reached for the glass and drank.

  Done, he shut down the desktop. “Can we make this short? I need to handle an order.”

  Having come all this way, she wouldn’t let him off before he answered her questions. “This won’t take long, Damien. It’s important we talk,” she said. “You know about what happened on Villa d’Alésia?”

  He nodded.

  “Did Yuri seem worried?”

  Damien rubbed his cheek. “My aunt’s in the hospital, maybe I didn’t pay attention. I don’t know.” He was lean and muscular with wavy black hair that went down the nape of his neck. Handsome, wounded—her type. Well, maybe not bad boy enough.

  Then she thought of Melac. Look what bad boy had gotten her.

  She decided to test her hunch. “Did you not return my call because you’re scared of the Serb?”

  “Serb?” Surprise filled his face. “Zut! Three hours ago I returned from my aunt’s hospital bed and found flics waiting to question me over Yuri’s murder.” His shaking hands spilled the glass of water. He wiped at the puddle with his bandanna. “Then they quizzed me over a painting.”

  Aimée had no concrete reason to suspect him of anything, just his proximity to Yuri and the uneasiness in her gut. But he must know something, even if he wasn’t aware. She practiced her concerned look.

  “Talk about a bad time,” she said. “I know it’s difficult for you now. But the police investigation is focused on a Serb, the man we ran over, in connection with the stolen painting.”

  A lie, but they should be focusing on that.

  “That Serb? The dead man in the street?” he said, trying to piece this together. “But how could he murder Yuri this morning? That makes no sense … unless you’re saying he was working with others?”

  “I’m saying nothing,” she said. “Tell me about the portrait Yuri recovered from the rue Marie Rose cellar.”

  Sadness filled his eyes. “Yuri told you, didn’t he?”

  If he’d lived he would have. She nodded.

  “Yuri’s the only one who believed in me,” he said, his voice choking. “It shouldn’t have happened.”

  Alert to the different tone in his voice, she looked up. “What shouldn’t have happened?”

  “If only I had.…” His voice trailed off.

  Again that fear in his face. Then it was gone. Blaming himself?

  “Done what, Damien?”

  “Yuri called me this morning. Left a short message on my phone saying he didn’t need a ride to the art appraiser. But my aunt is dying, and I didn’t.…”

  Aimée gripped her glass of water. “Did he say why he didn’t need a ride anymore?”

  “He told me not to worry. That’s all.”

  Odd. “But his painting was stolen last night.”

  “That’s what he told me, too.” Damien shook his head. “So I just stayed at the hospital with my aunt all day. What an idiot I was. I should have gone to his studio.”

  She understood his feelings of guilt. If only she’d arrived earlier herself. Those damn detours on the Left Bank. The protesters blocking rue d’Alésia.

  Damien’s knuckles whitened on the edge of his desk. “The doctors gave my aunt days to live. That was a month ago.” A look of pain crossed his face. Genuine, as far as she could tell.

  “Desolée, but if you could answer a few more questions?”

  “My uncle left me this printing business tottering on its last legs.” Damien sighed. “Yuri mentored me. Now I’ve built up a clientele and have more orders than we can keep up with. I can keep the staff on. Support what I believe in.” She saw a hint of pride in the way he gestured to the posters.

  Political, like Madame Figuer said. She needed to lead this back to Yuri. But a file with Florent’s ugly mug sat on his desk. She remembered Florent’s knee between her legs, his garlic breath on her neck, his strong arms.

  “Your employee Florent.…”

  “Him? Gone,” Damien said, his mouth pursed. “Turns out Florent was robbing the till. Yuri had suspected him all along. Turns out he was right.”

  She sat up. Florent, the murderer. A straightforward revenge?

  “So Florent held a grudge against Yuri?”

  “Against me, bien sûr.” Damien expelled air.

  “Why’s that? Aren’t you his boss? The one who gave him a job?”

  “Called me a Comm
ie. Jeered at our goals in La Coalition. Complained that I print the posters and banners for free to support the cause. But he liked Yuri.”

  “Or until he found out Yuri suspected him,” Aimée said. “They argue, it turns nasty, and to stop him Florent—”

  “I told the flics,” he interrupted. “Florent made deliveries in Levallois all morning.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Damien stood, a file tucked under his arm. “Believe me, the shop owner called complaining. The flics checked.” Damien’s fingers played with the file. “Florent’s father and grandfather worked here. No matter our differences, it made me sick to fire him.”

  Aimée slammed down her empty water glass. “You’re naive. Florent attacked and almost raped me.”

  “What?” Damien’s voice rose in shock.

  “Open your eyes,” she said. “No one told you he was the type, eh?”

  He shook his head. “Florent’s always caused trouble, but attacking you.…” He ran his ink-stained fingers through his hair. “I had no idea. That’s terrible. Désolé.”

  She believed him.

  “In 1900 this was a Russian press employing deaf mutes,” Damien said, his brow creased. “Yuri never let me forget. He insisted we had to continue, stay loyal to the quartier, the workshops. Hire locals. But now commerce has dwindled down to us, Dupont the chauffage manufacturer across the street, and Yuri’s bookbindery.”

  A leftover nineteenth-century industrial Paris full of artists, publishers, bric-a-brac traders and craftspeople who saw themselves as the memory keepers of a time now forgotten. Underneath the peaceful and almost timeless look of the place, however, ran dark currents.

  But she didn’t need a small business lecture.

  “Granted, you’re not selling chocolates,” she said. She had to draw him out. “But the quartier’s still bohemian, cheaper but with a certain Montparnasse cachet.”

  “Yuri said that too.” His lip quivered. “I just don’t want to believe Yuri’s gone.”

  She needed to connect the dots. If she didn’t press for information, this would go nowhere. Time to appeal to his bond with Yuri. “Damien, this is important. Someone tortured Yuri to find the painting.”

  “Tortured?” Damien’s mouth dropped open in horror.

  “Madame Figuer didn’t tell you? We found him tied to his sink—beaten, tortured, then drowned.”

  Shame, guilt, and something else crossed his face. “Who would have … hurt him like that?”

  “Damien, I’d say you’re in danger, too.”

  “Me?”

  “Do the math,” she said. “Two of the three people who saw the painting are dead. You’re the third, non? You took this Polaroid.”

  His intercom rang. Instead of answering he headed to the door. “Look, I’ve got orders to fill.”

  “You helped Yuri clean out his father’s cellar, and he found this painting. Then you brought him to the art dealer to see if it was genuine.”

  Damien turned. The printing presses chomped in the background. “Not me.”

  “Then who did?”

  “Why does it matter now?” He shook his head. His shoulders sagged as if in defeat.

  “Someone shoved the art dealer in front of the Métro this afternoon.”

  She couldn’t prove that.

  “You should talk to Oleg,” Damien said. “He took Yuri to see the art dealer.”

  Oleg. Her next stop. “Don’t you want to help me? Wasn’t Yuri your friend? Tell me everything you know.”

  Damien rubbed his eyes. Hurt and bewildered, he looked out the window into the courtyard. Loaders filled stacks of posters into a camionnette.

  He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. Saturday Yuri asked to borrow our camionnette. That one. To clean out his father’s cellar. I offered to help. You know, given his medications and all the times he’s helped me.”

  Damien paused.

  Aimée reined in her impatience. She knew all this. But maybe there was more.

  “All full of garbage, old newspapers,” he 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 the Resistance had used the tunnels as a command post in the days preceding liberation.

  As if it had been yesterday, Aimée could still feel her wet rainboots and heavy school bag on her shoulder. See those walls of bare bones illuminated by bulbs hanging from a single wire. Feel that jolting terror at the mountains of skulls. So terrified she wanted Morbier to carry her. But he’d ducked his head under the timbers. Afraid he’d call her a baby, she tried to keep up, tramping through the webbed limestone tunnels lined with hundreds of thousands of bones. So scared, wanting to close her eyes. Wrinkling her nose at the musty dirt-laced odor of the departed. Shivering at the chill emanating from the earth.

  “Were you a soldier, Parrain?” She’d called him godfather until she was ten. She tugged his sleeve until he slowed down.