Murder Below Montparnasse

by Cara Black

  “Too many people I know.” He lifted his chin. “Café du Soleil d’Or on the other corner.”

  Too many ghosts for her there. But she nodded.

  AIMÉE TOOK AN inside table at the window. Memories drenched the old bistro—the back banquette where she’d done her geography homework while her grand-père bantered with the owner over a bottle of wine. Her father had been denounced by a colleague at the bar, humiliated in front of off-duty officers. They’d engineered for him to be thrown off the force.

  She’d vindicated him, but only years later, after his death.

  “Mademoiselle Aimée?”

  She smiled up at Louis, the owner and her grandfather’s drinking partner. “How’s your wife, Hélène?”

  Louis’s eyes clouded. “Her funeral was last month. We held the wake here, didn’t Morbier tell you?”

  “I’m sorry.” Saddened, she took Louis’s hand and squeezed it. A generation was passing. “I would have come if I’d known.” Would she have? She averted her eyes.

  “Couldn’t face them, could you?”

  “The old-boy network who accused Papa?” She caught her breath, wishing she’d bitten her tongue. Her father’s supposed friends, who kicked him when he fell. Yet all of them were still in power at 36 quai des Orfèvres.

  “Then why come here today, Mademoiselle?” He set a carafe of water on her round marble-topped table. “Seems you can’t forgive and forget.”

  “I’m investigating, Louis.”

  “So you want to bend a flic’s ear?”

  “He better bend my ear.” She winked. “Information.”

  A little smile cracked his wrinkled face. “Just like your grand-père. You learned from the best. But a fille like you should be having babies. Your grand-père wanted.…” He paused. “Women do it all these days, they say, juggle a job, children.”

  Not this again. She’d heard those words often before. “I need wider hips, Louis.”

  But Louis snapped his finger at the waiter smoking on the pavement and motioned to a table with patrons waiting to order. Always hands-on. “The usual?” Louis asked.

  She nodded. A few minutes later, Louis set a Perroquet on the table. She diluted the intense green mint syrup with water from the carafe, and sipped the anise-flavored Pernod. From the window she watched the sun-drenched balconies of the blackened stone préfecture, the mid-morning throngs in line for the Sainte-Chapelle, workers spilling from offices to smoke on the pavement or heading to the bus stop. Pulsing with energy like always.

  “That seat taken?”

  That deep voice shook her to the core. Surprised, she looked up to see Morbier.

  He held a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger in one hand, a cell phone in the other. Today the bags under his eyes were less pronounced, his clean-shaven chin showed less pallor, and he looked almost relaxed. Morbier, relaxed?

  The ironed blue shirt, the tie, the whiff of Vetiver cologne, no stains on his corduroy jacket for once—it all spoke of promotion. Had that case been closed with her help?

  “Nice outfit, Morbier. Nominated for an award?”

  A flicker of surprise. “Nothing like that.” He paused. “No happy face for me? I went végétarien and put myself on the line for Saj’s release. Why that look, Leduc?”

  It broke out before she could stop herself. And she didn’t care. She needed the truth.

  “She’s alive, isn’t she? The fixer?”

  He blew a plume of smoke that hovered in the sunlight slanting in from the window.

  “Can’t say it, Morbier?”

  “Say what, Leduc?”

  “My mother.”

  His thick brows knit in his forehead. “Didn’t we handle that?”

  What kind of jargon was that? “How about the real story, Morbier?” Her lip trembled. “The truth?”

  His cell phone rang in his hand. A brief check and his eyes softened. He turned away to answer. “Jeanne, I’ll call you back.…” The rest she couldn’t hear.

  “Ah, cherchez la femme,” she said when he turned back to her. “The woman who makes you morning coffee, irons your shirt.”

  Hurt hazed his eyes, then disappeared. He stabbed his cigarette out in her Ricard ashtray.

  “Jeanne’s my grief group facilitator, Leduc. Cheap shot.”

  Morbier, in grief counseling?

  “She’s helping me deal with Xavierre’s loss.” A shrug. “But that’s off point.”

  “Désolée, I didn’t know.” Why did she always feel like a little girl with Morbier? That inner compulsion to throw him off balance. Hurt him, like now.

  But she knew why. All the secrets he’d kept from her. She needed his help again.

  “Last night someone broke into my office, drugged me, and almost drowned me in a water bucket,” she said. She chewed her lip. “They called my mother ‘the fixer.’ Demanded I contact her.”

  “Who did this?”

  “I don’t know,” Aimée said. “She’s in danger. I need to reach her.”

  “Let the past go, Leduc.”

  That’s all he could say?

  “Leave it alone for once. It’s over, you know that. She’s gone.”

  “That’s not what I’ve heard,” she said. “I’m in over my head. They almost killed me, Morbier. They gave me twenty-four hours.”

  “For what, Leduc?”

  She told him what happened. Finished up with his voice message on the machine. “Zut alors, your irritated message saved my skin.”

  An unreadable look crossed Morbier’s face. “How?”

  “Your name carries weight. It’s not like last time. No one’s using me to get to her. She’s involved.”

  “How can you be sure of that, Leduc?”

  “Yuri was an old Trotskyist.” She thought quick, putting her assumptions together. “They knew each other from the raid in the seventies, when she got caught. My father kept a file—”

  Just then, Raphael Dombasle entered and waved to her at the café door. What timing.

  “What do you know, Morbier?” she said.

  “Never kept tabs on her history,” he said. “Take a vacation, Leduc. Sun, sand, and surf.”

  “That’s all you can say?”

  He shrugged. “Cherchez l’homme? Melac not bad boy enough for you?”

  “You know him, Morbier?”

  “I wish I didn’t.”

  What did that mean?

  “Don’t think you can suck me in, Leduc.” Morbier chewed his cheek.

  And then he stood up, nodded at Dombasle, and went out the door to be swallowed up in the crowd. Just like that.

  “You’re well connected, Mademoiselle Leduc.” Raphael Dombasle hung his coat on the rack, sat down.

  “Morbier’s my godfather,” she said.

  Dombasle pointed to the Perroquet and called, “I’ll have the same, Louis.”

  Louis winked. “You two make a nice pair.”

  Aimée’s cheeks reddened.

  Dombasle tucked his briefcase under the round table. “Word goes you’re an investigator with a knack for manipulation.”

  “You say it like that’s a bad thing,” she said, determined to concentrate, to forget the sting of Morbier’s abandonment. He hadn’t even blinked when she’d told him her life was in danger. Why did she keep trying to bridge the distance between them when he cared this little about her? “But my job’s computer security, Monsieur Dombasle.”

  “Michel vouched for you, or I wouldn’t be here,” he said. He’d checked her credentials.

  She studied him. Slim. Intense dark eyes, tousled russet hair curling over his collar. Not the typical flic. More of an art historian, a tad intello. An interesting mix of flic and bobo.

  “What do you have to tell me?”

  Right now she had no way to find the painting unless the art cop gave her a lead—she’d parse the details, avoiding her mother. She gave him an edited version.

  “Please, call me Raphael.” Dombasle loosened his tie. “But we’re t
alking about an unknown Modigliani, which I imagine has no authentication or provenance?”

  “Hypothetically, if the painting had authentication, documentation and all that, what’s the value?”

  “Why do I feel I’m missing something?” Dombasle sipped his drink.

  “Michel I trust. You I don’t. Yet,” Aimée said. “But I’m sure you’d like to find it. So would I. And so would some Serbs.”

  Dombasle grinned. For a moment he relaxed. “Et alors, you don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

  “I don’t have the time.”

  “In our field, it’s word of mouth, trust, relations built up over the years. The art dealers’ world is hermetically sealed, apart from small fissures from time to time.”

  “When greed takes over?”

  He nodded. “Usually. If our department recovers ten percent of the art stolen in a year, we consider that good. The number of thefts, private and national, is immense. But the profit’s enormous too.”

  Only 10 percent? Her heart fell.

  “But people don’t fence a Modigliani on the corner,” she said. “This painting warrants an elite type of buyer, non?”

  “You want Interpol statistics? Three quarters of stolen art end up transited through a minimum of three countries, exchanged for goods including arms and gold. Recently, someone traded art for a restaurant chain in Slovakia.”

  A means to an end. A kind of currency.

  “Collectors comprise less than one percent of art theft. A focused hit is rare.” He paused. Angled his fingers toward hers. “A Modigliani—say one of the several he painted of Jeanne Hébuterne, his last lover—would go for seven or eight figures.”

  Dombasle’s cell phone vibrated on the table. He glanced at the number.

  “Museums shy away, since the authentication process would eat up a good portion of their funds. Modigliani is one of the world’s most forged artists. Not worth the connoisseur’s effort, to be blunt. Your Yuri Volodya might have had a fake.”

  Luebet hadn’t thought so.

  “Sounds like you’re chasing smoke.”

  Little did he know. She hadn’t learned much from this conversation. Frustrated, she fingered the cardboard drink coaster.

  “My office investigates robbery claims,” Dombasle said. “Where’s the robbery? There was no report made.”

  “To investigate, you need a dead man to make a claim?”

  “Why do I think you want my help, yet aren’t telling me the real story?”

  Time to give him something. Figure out how to work an exchange. Use him.

  She brushed back guilt. Less than twelve hours remained and so far she’d come up clueless. If he was smart—and there was no doubt on that score—he’d use her too.

  “Say an old man found a forgotten Modigliani in his father’s cellar,” Aimée said, glancing around for listeners. Only at a far table, a woman talking into her phone, a bulldog at her feet. “He’s unsophisticated and runs his mouth. He contacts a renowned art dealer—you might know him, his name is Luebet—for an appraisal. But before the appointment, the painting’s stolen. The old man, Yuri, is found tortured and dead the next morning. Later, Luebet ‘falls’ on the Métro tracks. I can’t prove any of this except they are both dead.”

  “Then it’s the Brigade Criminelle’s territory. Not mine.”

  Didn’t the forces work together? Collaborate? “People don’t murder for fakes, do they?”

  “You’d be surprised.” Dombasle shrugged. She noticed the gold flecks in his dark-brown eyes.

  “Then time for show-and-tell. I show and you tell, d’accord?”

  “Depends on if you’ll accompany me to a reception tonight. A vernissage.”

  Was he flirting with her?

  “An art opening, that’s your tell? Would I find it interesting?”

  “You might learn something.”

  “Meaning?”

  “A respected world authority on Modigliani will attend,” he said.

  “That’s all?” she said, disappointed.

  “Then you’re afraid this supposed Modigliani will crumble under an expert’s scrutiny?”

  Smart-ass, she almost said.

  Instead she placed the Polaroid over the Stella Artois cardboard coaster.

  Dombasle pulled out an eyepiece like a jeweler’s loop. Adjusted the magnification and added a small lens. Like an optician.

  He read out loud. “ ‘For Piotr, a keepsake of your friend Vladimir. Modigliani.’ ”

  “Still think it’s fake?”

  “Where did you get this?” He leaned forward and covered her hand with his.

  Aimée grinned. “With your hair poking out like that and your eyepiece, you remind me of a mad scientist.” She pointed to the Polaroid. “You know one of those men, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “Luebet.” He stared closer. “Taken when?”

  She took a guess. “Sunday.”

  “How are you involved?”

  She had her story—a version of the truth—ready. She showed him the message written on Luebet’s envelope.

  “So Luebet wanted the Modigliani,” he said, glancing at his insistent vibrating phone. “He’d contacted some person or persons to steal the painting for him before he performed a professional appraisal.”

  Her thoughts, too. Brought it back to the theory that there were two teams on the playing field. But the ball had already been stolen.

  “But a respected art dealer.…”

  “Seen it before. No surprise. He’d contact someone who’s ripped him off before—a thief who knows his métier—say ‘Let bygones be bygones, I’ve got a job for you.’ ” He lifted the photo to look at the painting again. “Any idea who stole it?”

  “Would I be meeting with you if I did?”

  Dombasle’s phone rang again, and he excused himself to answer the call outside. She counted on him, as a member of the art squad charged with recovering stolen national art treasures, to investigate. She knew Michel’s team kept more irons in the fire than she could imagine. Contacts, information, a network she hoped to access. Right now, with no leads, she didn’t see another option.

  Doubt gnawed her insides, raw and festering. It would never be completely gone until she located the painting. And she didn’t have much time. The painting was the only key to her mother.

  And to finding out if her mother had tortured Yuri.

  She tried to keep those thoughts at bay and had almost drained her Perroquet by the time Dombasle slid back onto the rattan café chair.

  “I’ve got a proposition,” he said.

  She saw excitement in his gold-flecked eyes. Whoever had contacted him on the phone had changed his mind.

  “Twenty minutes ago, an antiquaire at the flea market showed my colleague the same photo,” he said.

  “So you believe me now?” she said.

  “We propose to stage a buy. Use you as the client. Interested?”

  “Moi?” She sat back, her leather leggings rubbing on the rattan chair rungs. “You trust this antiquaire?”

  “They’re all crooks at Marché Sainte-Ouen, but this one’s my informer,” Dombasle said, downing his drink.

  “He gives you a little info and you look the other way?”

  “Works for both of us.”

  She’d heard of the pipeline, how antique dealers moved stolen paintings, furniture, and jewelry for thieves in a hurry. Wished she’d thought of it herself.

  “But fencing a Modigliani in the flea market? Sounds unprofessional.”

  “Two years ago, I nailed a Velázquez there by the frites stand,” Dombasle said. “Still in the eighteenth-century frame. Idiots, thank God. They didn’t know what they had. Didn’t much care either, after the quick cash.”

  Aimée’s mind clicked over everything she knew. What about Oleg’s buyer?

  “Has your antiquaire sparked any interest?”

  “My colleague intimated as much,” he said. “First I need to check the painting against our da
tabase of stolen art.”

  She doubted he’d find it.

  “Modigliani’s daughter inherited nothing,” he said. “Not a single painting.”

  Aimée shook her head. So unfair, when her father’s work fetched millions today.

  “A sad, broken woman.” He paused. “I met her once before she died. You’d never have known she’d run a Maquis network during the war.”

  “Part of the Resistance?”

  “In the South. Then a long affair and children with a married man who kept a double life. In the end, too much of the bottle, forgotten by her last lover. Her body was found days after she died. Tragic. Like her father.”

  But what about the Serb? All kinds of questions rose in Aimée’s mind; the blood smeared on Yuri’s wall, his Levi’s jacket button—all evidence of a fight. Who was this phantom thief who supposedly stole the painting first and somehow murdered the Serb in Yuri’s house? The Serb’s “brother”? But then why would he pursue Saj? To tie up loose ends? Or, less likely, a flunky of Luebet’s? But that didn’t make sense, according to what Luebet wrote on the envelope.

  Dombasle’s buy complicated things.

  “I’m confused,” she said, “too many threads. You haven’t told me the plan.”

  He explained over another round of Perroquets. “We’re organizing a buy. Setting the wheels in motion. All the more reason for you to attend the reception tonight. I’ll know more details. The drop schedule.”

  She’d bartered her info for what … a Modigliani expert? That was it? And now she was a pawn in a buy? “This could work?”

  “If the thief’s desperate, and thieves usually are, it works nine times out of ten. A hot piece for quick cash, that’s what they want.” He paused. “Worried?”

  “I’m guessing you involved la Crim and the art cops at BRB.”

  “You know I can’t say.”

  “But you’re asking me to stick my neck out, wanting to use me as a patsy?”

  Had word of her involvement in Morbier’s sting gotten around the préfecture? She couldn’t fathom Morbier compromising his case or talking when he’d promised “no leaks.” But she still wanted to kick him.

  Dombasle looked down at his drink. “Let’s just say all law enforcement involved would appreciate your assistance. That do it for you?”

  All frothing at the mouth, too.