Murder Below Montparnasse

by Cara Black

  She peered over the boxes and caught her breath. To the left, in a recessed alcove, were stacked La Coalition posters; above them hung a detailed street map of the Montparnasse quartier dotted with Post-its marked with X’s. On the floor sat blue canisters of propane gas, the kind available at a hardware shop. Bags of fertilizer.

  Aimée froze. Good God … bomb-making material. And a map of the locations. Hadn’t Solange, Saj’s Goth neighbor, said—what had it been?—La Coalition is militant organizing?

  Damien was leaning over something at the worktable. The phone was stuck between his shoulder and ear as he listened. Above him, on the shelf, she saw the detonators. She stifled a gasp.

  “But Bereskova called me an hour ago,” he said.

  Merde. She’d been afraid of that.

  “What do you mean?” he said. Pause. “I won’t go a centime lower on the painting. He agreed on the price.”

  He had it. She remembered Yuri’s message: “I know who stole the painting.” She’d thought he meant her mother. But Yuri had counted on reasoning with Damien to return the painting.

  But reasoning with someone crazed by grief who kept his moldering aunt next door? A fanatic obsessed with his political cause, bomb-making … Why hadn’t she realized it sooner?

  What if Yuri had confronted Damien about the painting, things had heated up, and.…

  Had Damien killed Yuri? Her mind went back to the demonstration blocking rue d’Alésia—how easy for Damien to slip into the crowd and blend in. She remembered the La Coalition armband on his desk.…

  But torture his mentor and friend?

  “Change the plan, why?” Damien said.

  She had to move fast. Wanted to kick herself for leaving her Beretta in her office drawer. Now she had to find a way to defend herself, a different way out. The stairs down to the printing presses were blocked by boxes. Ducking low, she moved over the slanting wood floor toward rolls of brass wire, careful to avoid the metal drums of ink, the shelves with boxes of metal type.

  “We worked this out,” Damien was saying. “Now … you’re sure?”

  Damien carefully slipped something in a cardboard tube, the kind used for posters. Her heart thudded. The phone still to his ear, he headed for the door—right where she stood. Stepping back, she tried to slip into a recess. Her bag fell off her shoulder and she made a vain attempt to catch it. Too late.

  “You?” White-faced, rings under his eyes, he looked more haggard than before. He was still wearing the same clothes, wrinkled as if he’d slept in them.

  Before Aimée could bend down for her bag, he’d kicked it into the corner. Her phone was in it. No chance of reaching the flics now.

  Trickles of perspiration ran down the small of her back.

  “The Modigliani belonged to Yuri, Damien,” she said, keeping her voice even. She made herself breathe. “It’s time to do the right thing. I can help you.”

  “The right thing? That’s what I’m doing.” His mouth quivered. Then a smile, and he pointed to the alcove. “They’ll listen to me now.”

  “With propane, fertilizer … making bombs?”

  “Don’t any of you understand?”

  “Understand what, Damien?” She kept her voice steady.

  “La Coalition will prevent the developers from ruining the quartier.”

  With bombs? She didn’t think so. Her shirt stuck to her shoulder blades.

  “All thanks to me when Yuri finally cleaned out that cellar,” Damien said. “It was me who found the painting, do you understand? I saved it.” Damien set the phone down on the worktable and picked up his jacket. She could see the lighted band of numbers across the screen. He hadn’t clicked off.

  Distract him, keep him talking.

  “You saved the Modigliani?” she said. “Why didn’t Yuri tell me?”

  “Yuri almost threw everything in a dumpster,” Damien said. “He had no idea. He laughed at me, but I did the research. Still, he wouldn’t listen.”

  Aimée was convinced now his aunt’s death had unhinged him—she needed to calm him, keep him talking. Prayed René could hear, that the phone was still connected.

  “So you took the Modigliani from Yuri’s closet for safekeeping?” she said. “You knew where he hid it, but he trusted you, non? Just so I’m clear, it was that afternoon Yuri went out for a little while before going to Oleg’s for dinner, right?” When Yuri slipped the envelope under her office door, wanting her help. “That’s when you took it?”

  “Good thing I did.” His eyes were too bright. Too focused. “Before the grasping art dealer’s thugs and Tatyana’s Serb could get to it. I told Yuri over and over that it wasn’t safe. Turns out he’d involved you—as if.…” He gave a strange smile. “So many depend on me, it’s the right thing I’m doing. We can continue our work.”

  Crazed all right. And delusional.

  “By making bombs? That’s destruction, not preservation.”

  “Only a means to an end, I explained that to Yuri. Over and over. But he wouldn’t listen.”

  She edged closer to the phone on the worktable. Praying René could hear. “I know you meant to protect Yuri. He helped you run this printing business—all that encouragement. You told me, remember?” she said, moving closer. “He regarded you like a son, non? You were there when we hit his car.”

  “More of a son than Oleg,” Damien said. “Even if we aren’t related by blood. Or marriage. All Oleg cared about was money. When Yuri boasted about the Modigliani, Oleg and Tatyana buzzed like bees to honey.”

  Aimée kept her hand behind her, moving forward with small steps. She needed to reach the wire, or something heavy.…

  “Stay back … stay right there.” Damien watched her with glittering eyes.

  “Reste tranquille, Damien, we’re just working this out,” she said. “Tuesday morning your aunt went for a CAT scan and Yuri called, just as you told me he did.”

  She felt something long, wooden with sharp points. Her fingers traced the sharp edges. Metal. She coughed to cover the sounds of it.

  “Damien, I know you meant well.”

  He nodded.

  “Didn’t you, Damien?”

  He nodded again. She needed him to talk. Needed to keep him focused.

  “Then tell me what happened,” she said. “I know you’re upset after your aunt’s death. But I need to understand to help you.”

  He glanced at his watch. She was losing him.

  “Didn’t Yuri want the painting back for the art dealer’s appraisal?” she said. “Then things got out of hand.” She approached him cautiously. “N’est-ce pas?”

  “I don’t have time for this.” His voice was different. Harder.

  “But you took the time to strangle Yuri with his own tie, to torture and drown him. Why, Damien?”

  “You want to know why?” Damien’s voice rose to a shout. “I found the painting, dusty and stuck in the back corner. Yuri promised me whatever it was worth.”

  “Of course, Yuri was generous to a fault, he would have shared with you,” she said. “But there’s history behind it. Modigliani gave Lenin’s portrait to Yuri’s father in friendship. His father knew Lenin as a young boy.”

  “Generous to a fault?” Damien snorted and grabbed the phone. “I counted on that money. But he’d cut me out. Yuri already had a buyer.”

  “So do you—millions from the half-bit oligarch who’s as greedy as you are.” Now more pieces fit. Tatyana was paranoid for a reason—he’d followed her. “You have the Modigliani in that tube to sell via Tatyana.”

  “Tatyana?” The muscles in his jaw twitched. “I didn’t mean to.…” His gaze flicked to the corner by her bag.

  Alarmed, she stepped forward, for the first time noticing a dark maroon footprint, the red trickle veining the grooved wood floor. The metallic smell of blood she could almost taste. Behind the boxes, under the worktable—a slumped Tatyana, her snakeskin scarf ending in a pool of blood. Her eyes were rolled up in her head.

  Aimée
gasped.

  “She showed no respect for my aunt. She kept yelling, demanding … I never meant to.…”

  “Like you never meant to murder poor Yuri?” Aimée said, shaking. “Or shove Luebet on the Métro tracks?” The hypocrite. “But torturing him? The same way Madame Figuer’s brother was tortured, to cover your tracks …?”

  “That old busybody? Such a joke, that old story of her brother.”

  Cruel as well as unhinged.

  “But Yuri turned on me. Wanted no part of La Coalition,” he said. “The bank refused me credit to keep this damned place going. How else can I keep funding the cause, making change happen? Look at Lenin.…”

  Lenin? “You think printing posters and making bombs funds a revolution?”

  “My aunt told me I deserved it. I do and now I will.”

  “Your aunt’s beginning to smell as bad as your ideas,” she said. “You fired your staff and shut the doors. Old news. Try something fresh, like admitting the truth.”

  “Yuri had already sold the painting—it never mattered what the appraiser valued it at.”

  Aimée shuddered. “You mean to the fixer?”

  Damien grabbed the cell phone, shoved the boxes at her, and ran. But she’d darted back, ready, and batted at him with the typeset roller. He ducked and tripped on the scattered boxes, dropping the phone and the tube, which skittered across the floor. Pieces of the rust-encrusted roller fell apart in her hands. Rust flakes spun in the air.

  Damien hobbled to his feet, grabbed the paper-cutter blade from the worktable. “You’re like the others,” he shouted. “You won’t get away.”

  The phone lay on the floor. She had to reach René. “Tell Rasputin now, René. Now!” she shouted, hoping to God the phone was connected, that he heard.

  Damien swung the paper cutter. Her back was up against the wooden boxes, nowhere to go. Shaking, she couldn’t stop shaking. She scrambled sideways, grasping for the floor—which, in her terror, seemed to tilt away. She heard the blade rip her jacket. Cold air whooshed up her blouse.

  An Yves Saint Laurent vintage jacket. Now she was angry.

  From one of the boxes by her elbow, she grabbed the first heavy thing her fingers closed on, a letterset bar of sharp, raised metal letters. She pulled it out and whacked him in the jaw. Damien cried out, spun, blood dripping from his cheek. He came back at her waving the blade. Darting left, she swung again. Hit his rib, heard a crack. The metal letters A and S clattered to the floor. But the sharp-edged letterset bar had pierced his T-shirt and was embedded in his chest.

  Damien collapsed, moaning in pain. His bloodstained fingers scrabbled to wrench it out. She bound his ankles and wrists with the wire before she pulled the bar out. Then she found the phone.

  “René … René?”

  “Funds delay done three minutes ago,” he said. “And Rasputin’s one happy camper now.”

  “Took you long enough,” she said. “Partner.”

  “I’ve missed you too, Aimée.”

  AIMÉE HEARD THE crow flapping in the next room. Managed to shoo it away from the old woman’s face. She’d leave it to Dombasle to call the health department, but he wasn’t answering his phone. She left the rue de Châtillon address on his voice mail. Let him figure it out. It was time she got out of here.

  Going out the way she’d come, she paused on the ledge and took the crackling canvas from the tube. Not much bigger than a large atlas, missing and unmissed for so many years, and now the cause of so much greed and death. In the fading sun, the lilac leaves brushing her arm, she unrolled it.

  It took her breath away. A man almost alive looked back at her. The curve of his cheek, the thin mustache, the almond-shaped nut-brown eyes. So vulnerable, so in love, it shone. Warm with an appetite for life, a hunger to experience. Flecked with doubt, maybe, but a fully fleshed-out human being in an ingenious assemblage of deft brushstrokes. The earth tones and still-vibrant green of the jacket, the patched elbow, the hands holding a booklet.

  Painted on the back, in quavering letters: M o d i g l i a n i for my friend Piotr.

  She took the photocopied letters from her bag, rolled them up with the painting, put them all in the tube, then stuck the tube in her bag. She’d let history decide what it meant.

  Friday, 4:30 P.M.

  AIMÉE WALKED IN the twilight with the Trotskyist paper rolled under her arm, hoping the Sainte Anne appointment would lead somewhere. Did these old Trotskyists stick together somehow? She’d recovered Yuri’s patrimoine from his father, but too late. Melancholy filled her. Yuri had hired her to recover his Modigliani. There were even four thousand francs and change left to prove it. Dombasle … the rest … she didn’t know.

  She turned into 64 Boulevard Arago, the walled Sainte Anne psychiatric hospital—la maison des fous, the madhouse, as people called it. Built over the Catacombs and quarries honeycombing the quartier, the hospital was, in the seventeenth century, a farm under the patronage of Queen Anne where les fous worked for their keep. The grounds never failed to make Aimée uneasy. The bars on the rain-beaded windows reminded her of La Santé a few blocks away—another kind of prison. For a moment she wanted to turn around and leave this wet, damp place.

  Years ago, she’d accompanied her grandfather here to visit a woman he called Charlotte.

  That cold, sleeting February afternoon flooded back to her: Charlotte’s pink peignoir, her little barking laugh, the intense look in her wide eyes; the sad expression on her grandfather’s face, the way he’d told Aimée to smile at Charlotte and act polite; how afraid Aimée had felt when Charlotte stroked her cheek with her bandaged wrist. “Why did we go see that lady, Grandpa?” she’d asked him in the café afterward over a steaming chocolat chaud. He’d shrugged, his shoulders slumped in resignation. “People shouldn’t be forgotten, Aimée. Not even the broken ones.”

  The caramel-colored stone pavilions, each named after a writer or thinker, seemed at odds with the mix of nursing staff and hospital-gowned patients who strolled in the gardens and greenery between them. No security cameras, lax supervision. Didn’t they worry the patients would get out? Or maybe the serious cases never saw the light of day.

  Half an hour early, she found the visitors’ café, a glassed-in affair with plastic chairs that gave one the illusion of sitting outdoors. Before she could order an espresso, a tall man in a green bloodstained gown joined the line. A doctor? But those weren’t scrubs. Her craving for espresso evaporated and she edged out of the line. No one looked twice at the man.

  At Allée de Franz Kafka, she sat down under the pillared pavilion on a wood bench framed by green metal. Now she wondered what to do. Her Tintin watch, its face clouded with moisture, had stopped again. Great.

  Muffled moans, a sob. Aimée cocked her head forward to see a woman seated further along the bench. Her face was buried in her hands, and she was rocking back and forth. Alone.

  Sometimes she felt like that too. Forlorn, adrift. But this was no time to read her own story in the woman’s suffering.

  “It can’t be that bad,” Aimée said, feeling inadequate the moment the words came out. Banal and patronizing. “I mean …” She hesitated. “Can I help you?”

  “Only if you weren’t followed,” came a reply. But the voice issued from behind her, by the entrance to the old underground operating rooms. Struck by the accent, the inflection, she turned around. Alert.

  “No one followed me,” she said.

  In the shadows stood a tall figure. A woman in a doctor’s coat. Aimée mounted three steps to the glass overhang.

  “You’re the fixer?” Her throat went dry.

  Aimée felt her hands being grasped, squeezed in the warmth of another’s. And she was enveloped in a hovering muguet scent. Familiar, so familiar. She felt a jolt like electricity as her eyes fixed upon the unlined face of the woman looking back at her: the chiseled cheekbones, the dark brows and large eyes, the carmine lipstick. She’d always thought she’d know her mother the moment she saw her. Feel a connect
ion like molten steel, the bond resurfacing. But she wasn’t sure.

  “Maman?” Warmth emanated from this woman.

  “Curious, always so curious,” she said. “When you were little, you asked questions day and night.”

  Aimée felt a sob rising at the back of her throat. A weight pressing into her. Her breathing went heavy. It couldn’t be … but it was.

  Her mother lifted Aimée’s hands to take a look at them. “Ink stains on your palms,” she said, her American accent tinged by rolling r’s. “You had crayon marks on them the last time. Even your father.…”

  “Papa?” she said. “You know he never got over you.”

  Her mother glanced away.

  “The company lied. As usual.”

  The CIA. “You work for them. A hired killer.…?”

  “Not any more, Amy.”

  Aimée’s throat caught. She hadn’t denied it.

  “I’ve led a double life. Done ugly things.” A shrug. “Dealt with devils. Paying the price to keep you safe,” she said. “Now I’m rogue and I can’t protect you. I counted on the wrong people. There’s no one left to trust now. But years ago I saved Yuri’s life.” A cough. “He thought selling his painting through my channels, the contacts I knew, would buy my freedom.”

  “You’re a fixer. Make things happen. Buy time.”

  A twist of her mouth. “I don’t have much, Amy,” she said. “Yuri shouldn’t have involved you.” Footsteps sounded and she stepped back in the shadows. Silent. Then a whisper. “Let me say what I need to.”

  Everything bubbled up—the hurt, the cold afternoon, the empty apartment she’d come home to when her mother abandoned them. Never a word in all these years.

  “Every day after school I looked for you.” That eight-year-old’s whining voice came out; she couldn’t stop it. Did the shared blood coursing in their veins mean nothing? But Aimée didn’t know this woman. “Why did you leave?”

  “I was protecting you,” the woman said.

  “Protecting me?” The words rose like a tide. “But I wanted you. My mother.” She looked down, her shoulders heaving.