Murder Below Montparnasse

by Cara Black

  Aimée gave a quick, impatient nod. “Et alors?”

  “Russian aristocrats at tsar’s court learned French, spoke it to each other instead of Russian,” Marevna said. “The elite had a love affair with French culture. French reciprocate—you know bistrot is a Russian word?”

  Aimée didn’t much care.

  “Tsar’s troops occupied Paris in 1871, but nobody served meal fast enough. ‘Bisto, bisto,’ meaning ‘faster, faster,’ they shouted in Russian. It became bistro—you know, for fast food.”

  It was too much. “Look, can you just check if there’s anything about—”

  Marevna huffed. “I try to tell you about why are Russians in Paris. You don’t know this, maybe his stories here don’t make any sense.”

  Aimée sighed and nodded. The withered caviar was starting to look delicious.

  “This Piotr.” Marevna tapped the pages. “He was poor in Russia. But you know even before the Revolution so many Russian aristocrats come to Paris. In 1900, the Exposition, they settle in little palais and give parties for French nobility. Later, Lenin and Trotsky, the revolutionaries, they come to Paris, and the tsar’s Okhrana, his secret service, also comes, to watch them.”

  “Okhrana?” The ones Natasha feared. “How do you know all this?”

  “Mandatory revolutionary teaching, before the fall of Soviet Union. Everyone my age learned history of our country and yours. We know white Russes aristos fled Revolution of 1917—dukes, counts leave everything. Now penniless. Drive taxis—you know about white Russians who drove taxis. Lana, the owner here, her uncle drove a taxi.”

  Marevna pointed to a wall photo of a middle-aged woman and older man posing self-consciously in front of the restaurant.

  “Then Jews before the Great War. After Great War, POWs and more Jews, who escaped Stalin’s stalag. Stalin say all POWs are traitors. After that, a wave of dissidents in the eighties, and like me, after the Wall tumbled, we came here.” Marevna shrugged. “The old white Russians look at us like trash. Soviet trash.”

  Aimée had no idea.

  “But essential you understand importance of Lenin in Paris.” Marevna’s voice rose, growing passionate. “This is where he … how do you say? Where he formulate his ideology. Like idealist. All his writings, he did in Paris. Cradle of Revolution, we learned. Right here.”

  Enough of the Revolution. “Of course, but getting back to Piotr and Yuri. Does he mention Lenin?”

  “Da. You see.” She pointed to the slanted Cyrillic letters, meaningless to Aimée. “That’s why I’m telling you. After his father died, Piotr and his mother lived on rue Marie Rose.”

  “How’s that important?” Aimée wanted to explode.

  “Piotr lived below Lenin’s apartment,” Marevna said. “He writes how Lenin bounced him on his knee.”

  Aimée nodded. Natasha had quoted that almost verbatim.

  “Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, made Piotr borscht,” Marevna continued. “Lenin helped Piotr’s mother get work as a cook. His father had died, the mother was so poor. Da, here he mentions Lenin,” Marevna said, pointing to a sheet. “He’s writing now how Lenin never had children. Piotr writes about him with affection, saw a human side.”

  Aimée watched as Marevna read more, jotted notes. Laughed. “Piotr’s describing his first taste of absinthe, when he’s eighteen. ‘Green like firewater,’ he write. At la Rotonde in Montparnasse, Modigliani buy him drink. Modigliani would sketch in the café for five francs. Then buy drink for everyone.”

  Aimée blinked. The ravings of Alzheimer’s or …?

  Drink, drugs, women, the legends and myths of Modigliani in Montparnasse. Or Modi, as they called him, rhyming it with maudit, cursed. A drunk lunatic.

  That was when Aimée noticed a photo sticking out from the pages. Much-thumbed, black-and-white and grainy. Three men stood squinting at the sun. One wore a bowler hat, another a scarf, and both towered over the short man between them. Aimée recognized the sign of la Rotonde café behind. And the men. Her heart skipped. She turned it over to see what was written on the back.

  André Salmon, Amadeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso, 1916, signed Cocteau.

  Stunned, Aimée turned it over again. Studied the faces. Happy.

  She picked up an envelope stamped UNDELIVERABLE—RETURN TO SENDER, addressed to Yuri Volodya with an old forty-centime stamp, a café name imprinted on the upper left. From days gone by, when cafés supplied writing paper to their patrons, who could count on twice-a-day postal service. Or la pneu delivery. She stared at the faded blue paper covered with Cyrillic—wondered where a salutation would go. But most of all, whether this involved Lenin.

  This was taking too long. Too much payout and no real information. Unless this photo had something to do with the letter. She opened the envelope, handed it to Marevna. “Do you see a date here? Anything about a painting or Lenin?”

  “Patient, please. June 2, 1925. This letter say, To my son Yuri.” Marevna’s eyes scanned intently. “Piotr writes about his bistro job when he was twenty-two, in 1920. Just married. About to have him, his son Yuri.”

  Marevna read further.

  “Piotr writes Modigliani was terribly sick. Tuberculosis. Like a plague, if people knew. Everyone avoided you.”

  Like AIDS today.

  “Modigliani hid disease, Piotr says, few knew. Or understood him.” Marevna looked up. “He wants Yuri to understand. Here it’s very sad.”

  Her voice had changed. Aimée leaned closer, struck by Marevna’s tone. “Go on.”

  “Piotr says no one saw Modigliani for several weeks. Piotr worried, so he snuck a pot of cassoulet from bistro to Modigliani’s atelier, on rue de la Grande Chaumière. Found Modigliani in his studio, in a very cold December, burning with fever. Coughing blood. No heat. Only ashes in the grate. He wished he’d brought coal. He saw empty wine bottles, moldy sardines in a tin. Modi’s mistress helped feed him but she was very pregnant, like his own wife. Difficult for her to get around. Modi said—to thank him—for Piotr to take a painting, anything he wanted.”

  The resto fell away and Aimée felt the cold, the worry a twenty-two-year-old Piotr knew for this genius, this man who’d been good to him.

  Marevna shook her head. “Here I try to quote. ‘Modi was always generous and kind to me growing up. The man lived to paint, to express. A purist. Genius. It pierced me to see him forgotten in this freezing room, surrounded by art he barely made a living from, shivering with fever. But Modi says then I must take the portrait of my old friend, Lenin. The one Lenin commissioned in 1910 but didn’t like.’ ”

  “Didn’t like?” Aimée interrupted.

  Marevna scanned the page. “An argument. Modi said they’d had some kind of fight. Lenin left for Switzerland and never took the painting.”

  Aimée sat up. A portrait of Lenin by Modigliani? Rare, unique, unknown. But if Modigliani painted this portrait as a commission in 1910, before Lenin returned to lead the Revolution, who else knew about this? What did this mean?

  “He writes Modi was coughing, coughing,” Marevna continued. “Blood over the blankets but Modi insists to sign the painting to him, ‘For my friend Piotr.’ He writes, ‘Modi said to me, “This means something to you, Piotr. You must have it.” And that’s the last thing he ever said to me. Two days later he died at the Hôpital de la Charité. Next day his mistress, big with child, jumped off a roof.’ Tragic.”

  Aimée noticed Marevna’s hands quivering. The paper was stained with a watery blotch of faded ink. As if Piotr had cried while writing this.

  So Piotr had a portrait of Lenin painted by Modigliani. A gift from the artist. Unless this letter had been forged afterward to give the painting a provenance. But the feel of the old blue letter, the stamps, the café address told her it hadn’t.

  “Is there more?”

  Marevna translated on. “ ’That night you were born, Yuri, all I remember was the cold wind on my way to fetching midwife. And your pink, wrinkly face hours later. That’s what I want to exp
lain—this painting belongs to you, too, Yuri. The painting was of Lenin, the man who lived above us, who talked to me when my own papa died. I will try to make things up to you since I had to go away.”

  Go away? Aimée checked the faded postmark. She made out 1925, the letterhead of Café de la Gare in Marseilles.

  “ ‘When you are older, can appreciate, the portrait belongs to you.’ That’s all.” Marevna looked up. “If the painting exists, it’s very sad. Very rare.”

  The painting existed, all right. Yuri’s murder attested to that. But who had stolen it last night?

  Piotr had written this as a testament, kept this letter for Yuri as an authentication. Yuri, not Natasha, should have had it. Why hadn’t it come to light while old Piotr was alive?

  Questions, so many questions.

  She figured Oleg, his stepson, knew of the painting’s existence—that was why he’d been snooping around for money lately. Were there others? She’d start with him.

  A door slammed in the back. Marevna jumped. Fear flashed in her eyes.

  “I have to work. You go, please.”

  “But there’s another letter,” Aimée said.

  “Not finished yet, Marevna?” came a voice from the kitchen.

  “Leave before Lana asks questions.” With a quick motion Marevna piled the papers together.

  “Careful. That’s delicate.” Before she could stick them in her apron pocket, Aimée gripped her hand. “Not so fast.”

  “But I translate more after work.”

  She’d discovered what she needed for now—the rest later. “We’ll meet then,” she said, noting Marevna’s mounting uneasiness. “I might need these.”

  Did Marevna see another avenue of cash? A conduit using the Russian grapevine—the tight community—to broker the information? A portrait of Lenin by Modigliani … and the letter to prove it. One needed the other. But then Aimée knew zero about the art world.

  A priest’s referral didn’t guarantee she could trust Marevna, but she had to keep her options open. Aimée stuck two hundred francs in Marevna’s pocket. “That’s for now.”

  She paused at the Trotsky photo by the door. A piece of the puzzle clicked in the back of her mind. “Lana’s political, a Trotskyist?”

  “That’s all so passé,” Marevna said, glancing back at the kitchen. “It’s her old uncle’s.”

  “He around?”

  Marevna tipped an imaginary bottle to her mouth. “Fond of the drink. Like all that generation.”

  Like Yuri.

  “Ask him to call me, will you?” Aimée handed her a card and another bill. Yuri’s money. “But this we keep between us, d’accord?”

  Marevna nodded.

  Tuesday Early Afternoon, Paris

  AIMÉE KNEW LITTLE about art, even less about the art world. But she knew who to ask.

  “Lieutenant Olivant?” said the receptionist at the préfecture de police. “He works out of OCSC now.”

  She never remembered the meaning behind those acronyms for various police branches. The terms changed all the time.

  “He still works with stolen art, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Bah ouais,” came the typical Parisian reply. “That’s what they do there, Mademoiselle.”

  “Mind transferring me?”

  A click. Another receptionist, who transferred her to the third floor, then another series of clicks. A bland recording of extension numbers. Finally, after punching in Lieutenant Olivant’s extension, she got his voice mail. Didn’t anyone answer their office lines anymore?

  She got as far as giving her name and number before the recorded voice came on. Message box full.

  Great. She’d try later. Right now a big, fat zero.

  The old man’s letter hadn’t shed any light on one mystery, though. How did Yuri know her mother? Dead, he couldn’t tell her. But if there was any chance to learn something about her mother, she’d find it.

  By now the flics would have questioned people on the street, the inhabitants of Villa d’Alésia. The mink-coated neighbor knew something—even if she didn’t know she did. She’d heard the raised voices. Aimée had to risk going back there to find this Oleg. She didn’t even know his last name.

  “YOU AGAIN?”

  Yuri Volodya’s neighbor, Madame Figuer, whose name Aimée discovered by reading the mailbox, stood in her door in a black jogging suit. Her red-rimmed eyes darted under freshly applied black eyebrows. “The flics want to talk to you, Mademoiselle. Ask you why you ran away.”

  “Please, Madame, I need your help,” Aimée said. “I’ll explain.”

  Madame Figuer gripped a pink cell phone. “May I help?” She punched in a number. “Explain it to them.”

  Aimée reached out and hit END. “Pardonnez-moi, Madame, but no phone calls. Desolée, it’s important.”

  Alarmed, Madame Figuer stepped back. Started to close her door. “Leave me alone.”

  Aimée stuck her foot in the door. “Please, we need to talk.”

  “They said you could be an accomplice.” Her voice rose. “Dangerous.”

  “Can you keep a secret?” Aimée shouldered her way inside, going with her plan B: on-the-fly improvisation—approaching plausible, she hoped. She needed to keep this woman quiet and glean information.

  “Madame, my unit investigates stolen art of national cultural importance,” she said, reaching in her bag. “Not many know of us. We work out of 3 rue de Lutèce.”

  At least her contact did. Unless the bureau had moved. Openmouthed, Madame Figuer stared at her.

  “Art investigator? In that outfit?”

  Aimée noticed a nick on her Prada boots. The pair she’d borrowed from Martine.

  “You think we wear uniforms? Forget those crime shows you watch on the télé, Madame,” Aimée said. “Nothing exotic. Our cases involve painstaking investigation. Any detail could lead to recovery.”

  Madame Figuer pulled herself ramrod straight. She was about to throw Aimée out the door.

  “We work independently, but often in tandem with police,” Aimée said. “Our interest coincides here, but I’m working another angle.”

  “Likely story. You ran off.”

  Aimée nodded. “I’m undercover. But I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “So I should believe that? Show me your credentials, your ID.”

  Undercover never carried ID. Too compromising if they were rumbled. But Madame Figuer wouldn’t know that. She pulled a card from her alias collection.

  “Ministry of the Interior?” asked Madame Figuer.

  “Thefts from cathedrals, state museums. In certain cases we investigate robbery from private collections. But that’s all I can say.” Aimée leaned forward as if in confidence. “I’ve told you more than I should. Yet your brother was an artist. Talented.” She gestured to the watercolors in the hallway. “You of all people will understand. That’s why I came to explain. Enlist your aid.”

  Madame Figuer blinked several times. Cheap to use the dead brother? But Aimée had struck a nerve.

  “You can’t think old Yuri possessed …”

  “A national treasure, Madame Figuer?” she said. “We do.” Suddenly she noticed a wonderfully buttery smell emanating from the kitchen. Her overwhelming hunger, which she’d forgotten in the excitement of the letter, came roaring back.

  “Yuri was tortured and murdered for it?” Madame Figueur’s hands shook.

  “I’d rather talk here, but we can go to headquarters.”

  Madame Figuer adjusted the jacket zipper of her jogging suit, played with the snap on her coin purse. “But I’m late for the market. The melons. Then the plumber’s coming to repair the water damage.”

  “We’ll make this quick.” Aimée gestured to Madame’s kitchen.

  By the time Aimée had eaten half the plate of Madame Figuer’s fresh-baked crisp almond financiers plus leftover pain perdu, she’d gleaned an outline of Yuri’s movements for the past three days.

  “The flics questioned me,” Madame Fig
uer said, “but then I didn’t volunteer much. Couldn’t. The shock. I took one of my pink pills.”

  “Pills?” The woman was elderly but seemed clear and alert to Aimée.

  “For my nerves, you know. When I think of Yuri tortured next door … just like my brother was betrayed and tortured in forty-three … it’s all so.…” Her voice trailed off.

  Coincidental? But Aimée kept that to herself. Perhaps Madame’s retelling over the years had, like such stories steeped in shame, become unspoken common knowledge?

  Madame Figuer shuddered. “Do you think la police will ask me more questions?”

  “Possible.” Aimée needed to work fast. “Let’s go back to when you noticed Yuri got ‘in butter,’ as you said.”

  According to Madame Figuer, Yuri had borrowed her wheelbarrow from her garden shed four days earlier to clean up his father’s cellar—that was how she knew his father had died. But when he’d returned it, he’d brought her a bottle of wine. “Soon we’ll be celebrating,” he’d said.

  Saturday he’d driven his old Mercedes somewhere with Damien Perret, the young long-haired man from the printing shop on rue de Châtillon. A nice boy, she added, in spite of his radical politics, but then everyone’s young once, non? Yuri’s stepson, Oleg, visited in the afternoon.

  But of last night’s accident she knew nothing, having stayed at her sister’s. She’d returned this morning to a flood in her apartment and loud voices from his open window across the courtyard wall.

  Aimée thought back to earlier that morning; she’d been at the morgue when Yuri had left that message. Not much later, he called to take back his words. After contact with her mother? An acid taste filled her mouth. She took a deep breath. “Did you hear a woman’s voice?”

  Madame Figuer shook her head.

  “Didn’t you say Russian before?”

  She shook her head again. “Thought so at first, but no, that I’d recognize,” she said. “The quartier used to be full of them. Thick with artists, too. Giacometti used to live here. He was like a stick man, the wild hair.…”

  More stories of the past?