Murder Below Montparnasse

IN THE CAFÉ below Leduc Detective, Aimée cupped her bowl of café crème, the froth swirling over the cup’s lip. Like the whirlpool in her mind.

The café windows were fogged up and the whole place smelled faintly of damp wool overcoat. The radio was tuned to the soccer scores. But she could only think of how Yuri Volodya owed her mother. Or so he said. But how? Was her mother alive? Or was he using her? And if so, for what?

And Yuri Volodya wasn’t answering his phone.

Last month Morbier had alleged her mother had gone rogue—dealt with arms dealers and terrorists. But Serbs? Art theft?

Aimée had nothing to go on but nightmares involving tattoos. So many questions. She could kick herself for not insisting that Yuri explain everything then and there.

The milk steamer whooshed. Zazie, the owner’s red-haired preteen daughter, rinsed glasses before going to school. Businessmen and workers from the nearby Louvre downed espressos, slapped francs on the zinc counter, and rushed out into the pearl-gray morning light.

What had Yuri revealed, except that he knew her mother was American? And what could that possibly have to do with a dead Serb or a stolen painting? She shuddered. What in hell had this terrible accident gotten them all into?

She had half a mind to mount her scooter and go over to Volodya’s place, but she held back. Too much work waited upstairs, and with Saj in the hospital … and Yuri Volodya still wasn’t answering his phone.

Last night her cell battery had been low so she’d turned it off. But Leduc Detective’s office number was on the card, too. What if Yuri had called her at the office?

“René forgot this the other day, Aimée,” Zazie said, pushing something across the newly wiped chrome counter. “Mind giving this to him?”

His classic car magazine. Aimée dropped her demitasse spoon.

“What’s that look, Aimée?”

“René got an amazing job offer from Silicon Valley,” she said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “He’s gone.”

“Just like that? Wow.” Zazie whistled. “René never mentioned it last time I saw him.”

“So incredible, they sent a private jet. They needed him right away.” Who could compete with that? Aimée pulled out her Chanel Red and in the gleaming reflection of the coffee machine reapplied her lipstick. She wished her hands didn’t shake. “Aren’t you late for l’école?”

“I’m in collège, Aimée. Remember?”

Almost twelve, or was it thirteen? “Of course.”

Zazie pulled her red hair back in a scrunchie and grabbed her book satchel. Paused. “Do you miss René?”

More than she cared to admit. Right now she wished she could talk with René, her sounding board and best friend. Hash out what had happened. “Zazie, he’s their new CTO—that means chief technology officer. Call me thrilled for him.”

“I miss him too,” Zazie said. She knotted her foulard, snuck a look behind the counter. Virginie, her mother, had her back turned. “May I try your lipstick, Aimée?”

Aimée slipped her the tube. “You’re growing up.”

“Fluctuat nec mergitur.” Zazie dabbed her lips and rubbed them together.

“My Latin’s rusty,” Aimée said. Drizzle pattered on the café’s street awnings.

“Means, ‘It is tossed by the waves but does not sink.’ ” Zazie grinned and placed the recapped lipstick on the counter. “That’s the motto on the Paris coat of arms. We learned that yesterday. Remember that, Aimée—tossed by the waves but does not sink.”

A wink and Zazie was gone in a gust of wet wind. A young boy with a book bag and an umbrella greeted her in front of the café door. Growing up, all right.

Aimée checked her phone for messages; still no word from Yuri Volodya or Serge the pathologist.

Time to head to work, check if Yuri had left a message on the office machine. And finish the report she and Saj should have worked on last night. She had a business to run, office rent to pay, and the rising cost of Miles Davis’s horse meat.

INSIDE HER UNHEATED building foyer, she bypassed the creaking wire-cage elevator and mounted the winding stairs. She needed the exercise. And time to steel herself for an office empty of René. And, she realized, no Saj either.

“Bonjour,” she greeted the new cleaning woman mopping the stairs, then continued up, keeping away from the banister to avoid snagging her leggings. She wished her waistband didn’t feel so tight.

A dim glow showed from behind the frosted glass-paned door of Leduc Detective. Hope filled her. Had this been a bad joke? Had René changed his mind?

“René.…” The words died on her lips.

“He gave me his key.” A rail-thin, mop-headed young man looked up from behind the keyboard at René’s desk. “I’m his student. He told you, non? A replacement.”

Her heart fell. No one could replace René.

She eyed the scuffed Beatle boots, which matched the tousled Beatle bangs fringing his eyes, the skinny jeans and the black turtleneck. This kid was René’s star hacker? He looked twelve.

“You’re Maxence, I presume?”

A lopsided grin showed braces. “À votre service.” She guessed Québécois from his accent. A Canadian.

She hung up her leather coat, tossed her secondhand Vuitton bag on the recamier. Unfurling her scarf, she flicked on the chandelier for more light. The crystal drops gleamed, thanks to the new cleaner’s feather duster.

“Tell me you’re at least sixteen and I’m not breaking the child labor laws.”

Maxence nodded, his hair in his eyes. “If you want.”

Anger burned in her. “If I want? I want to follow the labor code. Does René know you’re … how old are you?”

Maxence pulled out his wallet. “Sixteen, eighteen, twenty-two, whatever you’d like.” He fanned out a number of cartes d’identité like a hand of playing cards.

She wanted to smack him. Slammed down her keys instead, almost upsetting the vase of daffodils. René had brought them in; every spring, he bought bunches from large-fisted Eastern European vendors at the Métro entrance. He wouldn’t be refreshing this vase anymore.

“So you’re an outlaw, eh,” she said, “some boy genius? Let’s see your student card from the Hacktaviste Academy.” She scanned it. “According to this you’re eighteen.”

The new radiator emitted blasts of heat. Almost too hot. He gave another lopsided smile. “This work experience will be great for my new gaming company. I need to learn on the job, juggle tasks, set goals. Like I will for my own company.”

Her stomach churned. She debated telling him to put on his Beatles jacket and hike out the frosted glass door. “No room for interns here, desolée.”

He swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Please give me a chance,” he said, his cockiness gone. “I’ll do anything. René thinks I’m good. Let me help your part-timer, Saj.”

She knew the flics might hold Saj in garde à vue longer. Or his injuries could slow him down; he might need to take medical leave.

Maxence’s hopeful eyes bored into her skull. After all, René recommended him. Did she even have another option? Might as well try him to see what he could do.

“On a trial basis,” she said. “But you might take an early and permanent lunch.”

Fifteen minutes later, she’d checked the mail stacked on the marble fireplace ledge and started running the virus scans, checking the monitors for daily security contracts. All put in place by René. The whole operation could almost run itself.

“Keep your eyes on the systems and print out the reports and spreadsheets,” she said.

Maxence nodded, eager now. “Then shall I download the info onto René’s desktop files, make a backup?”

She nodded. Not so green after all. Her heart wasn’t in this day-to-day stuff; she’d let the kid handle grunt routine and monitor his work.

Ongoing reports filled her desktop screen, and she took her laptop from the drawer. On it, she pulled up the old files she’d digitized from her father’s dossiers. She’d transcribed his notes during the long November evenings after his death in the bomb explosion in Place Vendôme. A painful exercise in hopes of finding some clue to the explosion. But the leads had all gone up with him in a ball of fire and smoke.

All those years in the police force had instilled in him the habit of recording names, places, descriptions of people he interviewed or investigated—any memorable characteristic or quirk—in pocket-sized leather-bound notepads. Each entry, each date and name or initial, constituted a piece of a case her father had worked on. A detail he’d rechecked to fit pieces together. His scent clung to the notebooks. The pain lessened over the years, but never completely went away. For that reason, she kept his original notebooks rubber-banded together in the safe. Touching them hurt too much.

Now, she searched her father’s case files under V for Volodya, and Y for Yuri. Nothing. She kicked off her ankle boots, rubbed her stockinged feet on the smooth wood floor, and wished she had an espresso. René had forgotten—correction, she had forgotten to buy coffee beans.

Quiet reigned, apart from Maxence’s clicking fingers and the distant thrumming of traffic outside on rue du Louvre. With the report summaries done, she concentrated on refining her search. She limited the parameters to her father’s cases involving indicateurs, or snitches. Problematic, since her father often referred to his informers by initials or nicknames. Again, nothing under V or Y.

Her grandfather’s cases went back to the thirties, a few from the Surêté he’d carried with him as private clients when he’d founded Leduc Detective. She hadn’t gotten to digitizing those yet.

“Quite a history here,” Maxence said, gesturing to the wall with her grandfather’s sepia photo, complete with waxed mustache; Leduc Detective’s original license, circa 1925; her father’s first case in the newspaper; the old sewer maps of Paris.

“Nice that you’ve kept it in the family,” he said.

Looking down on her from the wall was her grandfather’s commendation from the Louvre for service to la République in recovering a Degas. Another stolen painting. She had her grandfather’s notes on the case. Somewhere. Fascinating, but not what she was searching for—she needed to find some connection to Yuri Volodya and her mother.

Think. Think like her father.

Trusting her gut feeling that Volodya had dealt with Leduc Detective in the past, she continued cross-referencing dates, names, and initials. Thirty minutes later, after eliminating the non-matches, she sat back, rubbing her big right toe along her left ankle to help her think.

“Remember your first impression,” her father had always said. “Nail it down or it comes back to nail you later.” Often all you had were first impressions to go on. She thought back to her first impression of Yuri Volodya, the old Russian—“a little Cossack,” one of the medic crew called him. Belligerent, scared. But a criminal?

Under RUSSIAN in her father’s case file, she found a photocopied Le Parisien newspaper article of a Trotskyist rally and conference in the 14th arrondissement. Dated 1972. A grainy photo showed what appeared to be an abandoned Regency-style townhouse splattered with graffiti, slogans, and banners with the hammer and sickle. A squat, according to the article, housing assorted anarchists and radical leftists in Action-Réaction. More photos showed smiling members with armbands holding posters. Her eye caught on a younger man, with more hair but stocky then like now. Yuri Volodya.

The connection—murky but there. So did her father know him? Or.…

She read further. The article detailed doings of the leftist squatters who’d played host to the German Haader-Rofmein gang—radical seventies terrorists—before a security forces raid.

Her throat caught. Several years ago she’d learned her American mother—Sydney Leduc—had been captured with the Haader-Rofmein group after she’d abandoned Aimée. Sydney had been imprisoned and deported in a deal wangled by her father. Her father never talked about it, refused to speak her mother’s name.

The hurt that never went away surfaced. Her hands shook.

Here was the connection. Why had her father kept this in his files?

She punched in Yuri Volodya’s number. Busy. She counted to sixty, tried again. Still busy. She pondered his logic of leaving her an envelope of cash with an urgent note about a priceless painting that needed protection, then going out for dinner, trusting a broom closet for security. Some elaborate ruse? But his anguish and fear had seemed genuine.

Tense, she glanced at the time. At Maxence, working at René’s desk. Wondered if she should chance leaving him alone and visiting Yuri.

Her cell phone trilled, startling her.

“Oui?”

“Since when do you run over Serbs, Aimée?” said Serge, her pathologist friend from the morgue.

“And live to tell?” She put Yuri’s information in her bag, switched gears and grabbed her ankle boots from the floor. “At first I thought he had a death wish, attempted suicide, or that he was drunk and confused, but.…”

“It didn’t feel right?” said Serge.

“All wrong. Tell me you’ve gotten results. His ID?”

“Besides the little Eastern European dental work he had?”

“That’s rhetorical, I assume.”

“Can’t talk, I’m finishing the autopsy.” In the background came the unmistakable whirring of a bone-cutting saw.

She grimaced. But with Saj facing a prospective manslaughter charge, his future teetered in the balance. Serge just loved to bargain; she would have to humor him. “S’il te plaît, Serge. I’ll babysit the twins.”

Pause. She heard the pumping spray of water pressure hoses. She cringed, unable to stop herself from picturing how the hoses were being used.

“Bon, twenty minutes. The usual place.”

SHE’D BEEN SLEEPWALKING since René’s departure yesterday, numb with the shock of hitting the Serb, Saj’s injuries. But now she needed to wake up and take action, figure out the dead Serb’s story and get Saj out of hot water. René would have warned her against getting involved and given valid reasons—a business to run, rent to pay.

Too late for that. Saj was in trouble. And there was no nagging finger to stop her.

But she also needed to figure out this Yuri Volodya. She’d checked Leduc Detective’s answering machine. Empty.

“Ever used Xincus database for a person search, Maxence?”

“Cut my teeth on Xincus,” he said.

“So dazzle me.” She wrote down Yuri Volodya’s name and address. “Find everything you can about him: birth, schooling, family, organizations he belonged to, politics, his bookbinding business, something with Salvador Dalí.”

“The works, Aimée?”

She nodded, rummaging in her drawer for a fresh cell phone. Thank God René kept them charged. She found a midnight-blue one and inserted her SIM card.

“Can you handle things?”

“I’m on it, Aimée.”

“Keep in contact with me at this number. Check with me on the hour. Don’t forget to monitor the reports.” She double-looped her scarf, grabbed her metallic ballet flats and stuck them in her bag. It was time to test Maxence’s efficiency and get to what needed doing. To where Leduc started. Grass roots.

“Good luck holding down”—she paused—how did they say it across the pond?—“le fort.”

A shrug. “If the Indians attack?”

“Arrows in the back,” she said over her shoulder.

AIMÉE KEYED THE ignition, popped into first gear, and wove her faded pink scooter through the congested traffic on Quai de la Mégisserie. Ten minutes later, she parked on the rain-dampened cobbles near the redbrick Institut Médico-Légal entrance. In the morgue’s waiting hall, busts of medical pioneers looked down on her, impassive and marble-eyed.

Last night’s incidents replayed in her mind with slow clarity: arguing with Saj, that white van pulling out, the terrible thump and those dull eyes of the Serb, his splayed palms pressed on the windshield for what seemed like forever but was only a few seconds.

The image was burned onto the backs of her eyelids.

Her trilling cell phone interrupted her thoughts. Yuri? But her caller ID showed Martine, her best friend since lycée.

“My publisher commissioned me to write a book, Aimée,” Martine said, excited. “A guide to looking chic.”

The last thing she wanted to hear about right now. “Congratulations, Martine.”

“I think I’ve got the main theme down. Alors, fashion sense involves mix and match,” Martine said. “Like you—it’s never just one look.”

“Moi?”

“But you’re the one who taught me to assemble outfits, make magic with two scarves. How to stock the definitive armoire. Zut, you schooled me in all the must-haves: a man’s jacket, le trenchcoat, a black sweater,” Martine rattled on. “A simple tank top, white silk blouse, a little black dress, jeans and, of course, a leather jacket. And Converse sneakers.”

“You know my feelings about tank tops,” Aimée said, shaking her head. “But you’re a serious journalist, Martine.”

“So I should refuse an outrageous advance?” Aimée heard the flick of a lighter. “I can write this in my sleep,” Martine said. A short intake of breath. “Not to mention I can use you, Aimée. Your mix of classic styles, déconstruit, that thrown-together look with a whiff of vintage. A touch of whimsy.”

“We share clothes, Martine. C’est tout.”

“But it’s how you throw them together, Aimée,” Martine said. “Tell me you’ll give me tidbits, help me do the tie-in spread for ELLE. Okay?”

Now, of all times.

“Martine, René took the job in Silicon Valley. Phfft—gone. Just like that,” Aimée said. “Compris? I’ve got a business to run.”

Not to mention saving her colleague from manslaughter charges. Or from the dead tattooed Serb’s partner.

“But René told you about his interview,” said Martine. Aimée heard a long exhale. Imagined the gray spiral of smoke, the taste of nicotine, the jolt. “Alors, they recruited him, those Silicon Valley … quoi?” Martine searched for the word. “ ‘ead’unters.”

“Headhunters, you mean?”

“Open your eyes once in a while, Aimée, before it’s too late,” Martine said. “Are you coping okay?”

All alone now. That old feeling of abandonment rose. Aimée bit her lip. “I want the best for René.”

A sigh. “Put yourself in René’s size twos. He’s gutted after losing Meizi. And haven’t you always worried over his health, how the cold worsens his hip issues? Never mind the money they offered.” Martine exhaled again. “He’s brilliant. You had to let him go.”

“As if I’d stop him even if I could,” she said. “Look, I’m at the morgue.”

“Who did you kill now?”

“Not me.” Pause. “We had an accident.”

“Et alors?” Another exhale of smoke. “There’s more. I hear it in what you’re not saying. Spill.”

Aimée could never keep anything from Martine for long. She sighed and then gave a quick version of what had happened the night before. “And to top it all off, I’ve let myself get so flabby and out of shape. Some fashion icon you’ll think I am when you see how tight my waistband is lately.”

“Saj totaled René’s car?” Martine said. “Get it fixed. But mon Dieu, are you saying now you can’t fit into the Dior?” She meant the blue vintage Dior they found at the winter sales. “Bad enough René is missing your cousin Sebastien’s wedding; now you have nothing to wear to it either?”

“That’s all you can say, Martine?” She hitched up her legging. Examined the scuff on her boot heel.

“Serb mafia, an old Russian, a painting?” Martine exhaled. “I’d say concentrate on what’s important. Sounds like that’s getting this mec off Saj’s tail.”

“You have a bead on this? Know a Serb who trades in art?”

Why hadn’t she asked the old man about the painting’s value? She didn’t even know who painted it, whether it was someone famous. Stupid.

Martine sucked in her breath. “Watch yourself, Aimée. Serbian tough men score low on finesse points. I wrote an article on them last year. We know they contract out. It’s the employer to watch out for.”

Morbier and the medic had cautioned the same thing.

“But what’s really important is that you’re not making a mistake with Melac,” Martine said. “He’s moving in with you, non?”

Typical. Only Martine could be thinking about Aimée’s love life at a time like this. “Only if Miles Davis agrees,” she said. “It’s complicated as usual.”

Melac, Aimée’s Brigade Criminelle detective boyfriend, was never around these days; he’d been seconded to an assignment he couldn’t talk about. Only his citrus scent clung to the sheets.

“But if you still need an escort to Sebastien’s wedding, let me suggest a man. He reminds me of the chocolate you like; deep, dark, and yes, somewhat decadent. I’ll introduce you.”

Always the matchmaker, Martine.

“Meanwhile, I’ll contact my seamstress,” she continued. “A perfect magician with Dior alterations.”

Serge beckoned from the lab door.

“Got to go, Martine,” she said. “Date with a cadaver.”

She hung up. A little shudder ran through her. Put yourself in René’s size twos. Was Martine implying that her selfish streak had surfaced again—the self-absorbed eye-blinkered mode? Had she driven René away, put too much pressure on him, relied on him too much? She’d made it all go wrong, as usual.

Practice your profession but also have a life, her Papa always told her. Morbier had no life—correction, even he had a woman making him morning coffee and she could imagine what else. In the end, René, her best friend and partner, had left her. The agency needed to be kept afloat. Yet dwelling on that right now would get her nowhere.

Aimée followed Serge down the stairs to the lower level, past the cold storage room and to the lab. The frigid air sent shivers up her neck.

Serge paused on the steps outside the morgue lab. The dark hairs below his knuckles were powdered with talc dust from his surgical gloves. “So you agree to help with the twins on their half-day holiday, Aimée?”

The usual price for any favors—babysitting his energetic twin boys, whom she likened to shooting balls of mercury.

“Your mother-in-law’s busy?” she said glumly.

He nodded. “Away for once at my wife’s sister’s in Sceaux.”

Jeanette, his wife’s mother, was a blue-coiffed, white-gloved ancien régime general’s widow with steel in her veins. Poor Serge. His mother-in-law ruled their life. Of course, Grandmère’s iron fist might be exactly what the twins needed in a babysitter.

At least Aimée wouldn’t have to take them to the pediatrician this time.

“There’s an exhibit at Cité Universitaire near Parc Montsouris,” he said. “My wife’s been meaning to take them.”

Fat chance. She’d bribe them with Orangina and pommes frites. As usual.

“Deal.”

In the Institut Médico-Légal corridor, a linoleum-tiled affair, Serge looked both ways and then pushed open a nondescript brown door. “Meet me at the dissection area. Second door on your left.”

She swallowed. Her mouth was dry as sand. “Why? Can’t you tell me here?” But the door closed with a whoosh behind him.

The formaldehyde fumes and the sweetish smells of decomposition met her in the long white-tiled room. Cadavers in various stages of autopsy lay naked on the trough-like aluminum tables. This was the part she’d hated about her first year of medical school. The part she couldn’t take, that compelled her to drop out.

“Is that necessary, Serge?” He had put on a mask, and was handing her one.

She avoided looking directly at the body, which lay facedown, and focused instead on the adjoining counter and the pair of rib spreaders resting on it. Serge consulted a clip chart, his brows crinkling.

“Intéressant.”

“That’s all you can say?”

“He the one?” Serge’s big eyes, behind his black-framed glasses, were wide. “Make sure, Aimée.”

She steeled herself and looked down. Flaps of the peeled-back scalp were draped over a portion of the exposed base of the skull. Beside the head, a blue bucket held the brain. The Serb’s back was white as aspirin but his arms were covered with blue tattoos. Crudely needled Cyrillic letters. “I’d recognize that tattoo with the wolf anywhere.” And she wished she hadn’t.

A tag hung over the dirt-ridged nail of his big toe: FELIKS.

“I hadn’t started the autopsy yet when you called. So I drew blood prior to opening him up,” Serge said. “I sent it for an expedited analysis, ran tests for the usual drugs of choice: opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, and alcohol.” He consulted the clipboard again. “A slow day, so for once they expedited the tests. All negative.”

“So he wasn’t high or stoned?”

Serge shook his head. “Notice those incisions I made in the neck and vertebrae. Not the optimal way to remove the spinal cord.” He shrugged. “But a way to look for subtle injuries to his neck.” Serge pushed his glasses on his forehead, moved forceps out of the way. “But I found nothing.”

Was that good? Or bad?

“You want the good news first?”

Hopeful, she nodded. “You found something else in the blood test, Serge?”

“First, explain your interest in this tattooed Serb, Aimée,” he said. “And why I’m helping you out again.”

“Saj ran over this Feliks,” she said, motioning to the toe tag. “Killed him, or so the flics think. I’m not so sure.”

Serge moved the scalpels and knives to the next cutting board. “A little difficult to argue, given the tire tracks on his fractured arm.”

“But the lack of blood bothered me,” she said. “And his expression—blank, even as he hit the windshield. Seemed so strange.” She made herself look down again at the scraped, tattooed torso. “Sounds stupid, since my closest experience to seeing someone get run over by a car was a rabbit René ran over near Charles de Gaulle once.”

“A rabbit?” He lifted his arm. “Never mind, I don’t want to know.”

The whole scenario from last night smelled, and she needed to air it out. “Can’t you give me the autopsy results now, Serge? I need ammo to shove in the flics’ faces to clear Saj.”

“Clear him?”

Why did he pretend not to understand? His pager buzzed. After a quick glance he shook his head. “I’ve got to make a call. Let me get back to you later.”

“Saj could sit in garde à vue under suspicion for involuntary homicide while.…” She took a deep breath. A nauseating sickish-sweet filled her nostrils. Bad move.

“What if I throw in overnight babysitting, chez moi? You know, twelve uninterrupted hours of freedom for you and your wife.” He wouldn’t be able to turn that down. But she didn’t own a TV. Somehow she’d figure out how to entertain the twins. Or take them to Martine’s.

Serge set the autopsy report down near the bucket containing the liver. “Make it quick. You were pre-med—figure it out yourself. And I never did this, compris?”

After the door closed, she picked up the clipboard and concentrated on trying to decipher the autopsy-ese:

1. Right forearm fracture, with relatively little hemorrhage.

2. Abrasions on front and back torso, arms, face consistent with scraping on street cobbles, again relatively bloodless.

3. In terms of the head, no hemorrhages beneath the scalp, skull fractures, or collections of blood around the brain—epidural, subdural and subarachnoid hemorrhages, or contusions of the brain itself. No lacerations in the ponto-medullary junction where one might expect.

She looked up as Serge entered.

“Zut alors, we ran over a dead man?”

Serge gave a small nod.

What the hell had happened? What had they gotten into? Between this news and the nauseating smells, her knees went weak. She grabbed at the table. Felt the corpse’s leather-cold flesh, gasped and let go.

Serge cleaned his glasses with the edge of his lab coat. “The medic reports the victim was still warm upon resuscitation attempts, no rigor mortis or lividity until later. His heart could have stopped anywhere from five minutes to an hour before.”

He turned the corpse over.

Aimée stared down at those half-lidded eyes. They looked exactly as they had when pressed against the windshield in front of her. Dead. “That accounts for his expression. No look of pain. No blood from the cuts on his face.”

Serge pointed his ballpoint pen at the pale bruise on the Serb’s shoulder. “I’d say he bounced off the windshield here. After he landed, his arm was run over, as the fracture indicates.”

“But if Feliks the Serb was already dead, how could he fall in front of the car?”

“Good question. The whole thing bothers me. Let’s look at the prelim crime scene photos.” Serge rustled through a folder. “This one shows the angle. Do you recall any parked cars, a tree, a motorcycle—anything he could have fallen off of?”

“It happened so fast, although it felt like slow motion at the time.” She studied the photos. The position of René’s Citroën. “A white van pulled ahead of us.…” Her index finger stabbed at the photo. “Here. If the Serb was standing between this parked truck and this motorcycle.…” She paused to think for a moment. “He could have caught his sleeve on the truck’s side mirror. For reasons unknown, his heart stopped. Then the car’s vibrations on the cobbles caused him.…”

“To fall.” Serge nodded. “His accumulated weight could have torn his jacket pocket, and he landed as you drove by.”

Serge pointed to the photo of the body on the cobbles. The ripped jean jacket pocket.

“Brilliant. No one dies twice. At least not as far as I know.” Aimée grinned. “This puts Saj in the clear.”

Serge didn’t share her excitement. He tapped his pen. “Still doesn’t give me his cause of death.” His other gloved finger probed the Serb’s jawline. “He presents no wounds apart from the crushing attributed to the injuries sustained after death from René’s Citroën,” Serge said. “No bullet holes, knife marks, or concussion or injury to the brain.” He checked the autopsy clipboard. Turned some pages. “His organs, brain came out normal. No distinguishable cause of death.”

Not her problem.

“Aimée, I’ve never issued an inconclusive autopsy report in my career.”

“Perfectionist” was Serge’s other middle name, after Pierre. He was thorough, a recognized expert in the medical pathology field.

“C’est bizarre. But before I throw my hands up, I’ll do a microscopic examination of the organs for what could have caused sudden death. Inflammation in the heart, maybe, like myocarditis, or inflammation in the brain. Never obvious.”

“What if he was using a new designer crack or injectable synthetic cocaine cocktail?” She shivered, and not only from the chill of the cadaver room. “They wouldn’t show on the standard tests you performed. You should run one of those advanced tox screen panels for other drugs, too. Have you examined his tattoos for puncture holes? He’s got enough of them.”

“Speaking of crack, our department head’s cracking down on our pathology budget,” Serge said. “We’re allocated funds for only standard blood screens and tests.”

“Didn’t you misplace that memorandum, Serge?” Aimée winked. “Or it got lost in the shuffle when you were at the medical conference in, where was it, Prague, non?”

His dark eyes lit up. “You want me to bend rules, like you?”

“Live dangerously, Serge. You’ve only got one life. Add spice.”

“So you’re adding spice with Serb gangsters? You need to watch out, Aimée.”

Her hands trembled. She put them in her pocket. She was tired of hearing this. “Has his brother ID’d him?”

Serge took off his glasses again. Rubbed the other lens with the edge of his lab coat. “No family has claimed him so far.”

Odd.

“How did the flics ID him?” Aimée asked. “Driver’s license, carte d’identité?”

Serge paused, put on his glasses and consulted another chart. Flipped the pages. “You never saw this either, Aimée.”

A smudged copy of a receipt from a kebob takeout on rue d’Alésia for Feliks. He must have ordered ahead.

“So his stomach contents corroborate this?”

“See for yourself.” Serge gestured to a bowl.

“Non, merci,” she said. “How soon will you file the autopsy, Serge?”

“I’m not finished, Aimée. First, I need the cause of death.”

She wanted to grab him by the throat. Shake him. Didn’t he understand?

“Until you send in the prelim,” she said, keeping her voice even with effort, “Saj faces manslaughter for this mec. Please, Serge, you know it’s wrong to leave Saj hanging. Get the prelim paperwork to the lead investigator’s desk.”

“What’s a few hours? Saj still needs medical care.”

“Didn’t I tell you this Serb’s brother tried to talk his way into garde à vue—”

“Bon,” Serge interrupted, waving his rib cutters. “You’re babysitting the twins while we take a weekend in Brittany.”

“Wait a minute, I offered overnight—”

“A weekend alone with my wife, Aimée. Take it or leave it.”

She stifled a groan. Saj better appreciate this.

SHE CHEWED HER lip as she opened Leduc Detective’s frosted glass door. Saj wouldn’t face manslaughter charges—a good thing. Yet, considering the snail’s pace of paperwork required for a release, she couldn’t hold her breath. She hated waiting for the catch-up.

Stacks of printouts, color-coded folders, and copies of faxed proposals lay neatly on her desk. Maxence had been busy. Nice job. “You’re starting to dazzle me,” she said.

Maxence grinned. “There’s a message on the machine.”

“From who?”

“Didn’t hear it, sorry. I got wrist-deep changing the printer toner.” Charcoal smudges ringed Maxence’s fingers. “Think you need a new printer.”

And the money to pay for it.

She hit PLAY.

Aimée heard a cough, clearing of the throat. What sounded like running water. “Please pick up if you’re there. Please, Mademoiselle.” She recognized Yuri Volodya’s voice. “I should have told you the truth.”

A chill crept up her neck. She turned up the machine’s volume. Listened close.

“I lied to you last night.” She heard the catch in his throat. Fear edged his voice. “Come now.” Another pause. “Please, if you’re listening, pick up. Your mother told me things.”

Her breath caught. Go on, Yuri, tell me what things. Tell me what my mother means in this. To you.

“You look just like her, you know. Those same big eyes. Alors, we need to talk in person.”

Aimée wanted to scream. What about my mother?

“I have to trust someone,” he continued. “A person on the outside.” Still that sound of running water. “Zut, it’s complicated, but I know who stole the painting. I need you to understand.”

Understand what?

She made out a faint knocking in the background. “You should know … Merde!”

Go on, Yuri, she prayed.

The message clicked off.

“He a friend of yours?” Maxence asked, looking up.

“I wouldn’t call him that.” Frustrated, she tapped her chipped mocha-lacquered nails on the PLAY button.

Maxence nodded in a knowing way. “Your mother referred him and now you have to help the old fart, n’est-ce pas? I know what it’s like.”

She sat, stunned. A slap like a wave of cold Atlantic seawater hit her. “Say that again, Maxence.”

“Don’t I know it, Aimée.” He shrugged. “My mom volunteers me all the time to help idiots who can’t even turn a laptop on. Stupid.”

Maxence didn’t know her American mother was on the world terrorist watch list. Or that she’d gone rogue. Rogue from whom, and why, Aimée didn’t know.

Her fingers gripped the phone. She sensed in the marrow of her bones that her mother was alive. Last month she’d been convinced that figure standing on the Pont Marie was … But what did that have to do with the painting?

Aimée hit the callback button. Busy. Shivers of hot and cold rippled through her.

She heard the fear in that sad, feisty voice of Yuri’s. Serb thugs had threatened him, he’d said as much. She’d found the Serb’s jacket button, seen the blood. The Serb dead before they’d hit him. What in hell was going on and how did it involve her mother?—if it even did.

Some trap? A setup?

The phone rang.

“Leduc Detective,” she said.

“I’ve changed my mind, Mademoiselle,” Yuri Volodya’s voice came on the line. “Forget my message.”

“What? Why?” She tried to make sense of this. “Mon Dieu, you talked to my mother.” Silence on his end.

“You two have history together, don’t you? That squat in the seventies. Trotskyists, non?”

Water rushed in the background. “My damn sink’s flooding. Don’t … come. Too dangerous. Complicated. She doesn’t want you involved.”

Doesn’t want … Her mother was here? So close?

But she was involved already.

“I’ll be right over.”

“Tell me about it!” Maxence was saying. “So if he calls again, shall I tell him you’re swamped with ‘real’ work?”

From her bottom desk drawer, she took her Beretta. Checked the clip to make sure it was loaded. Maxence’s jaw dropped.

“Non, tell him I’m on the way.”



BEFORE EXITING HER building’s foyer, she pulled on a black knit cap, shapeless windbreaker, and oversize dark glasses. She’d been warned three times this morning about Serbs; she’d exercise caution. On the rue du Louvre she scanned the parked cars for a telltale tip of a cigarette, a fogged-up window indicating a watcher. Nothing.

Tension knotted her shoulders. On the side street, rue Bailleul, she unlocked her Vespa and walked it over the uneven cobbles. For a moment, she wondered if she had overreacted. Nothing seemed out of place on the busy rue du Louvre except for a lone squawking seagull on a pigeon-spattered statue. He was far from the water. As lost as she felt.

She shifted into first gear and wove the Vespa into traffic, passing the Louvre. Fine mist hit her cheekbones. She shifted into third as she crossed the Pont Neuf. A bateau-mouche glided underneath, fanning silver ripples on the Seine’s surface. Swathes of indigo sky were framed by swollen rain clouds over Saint-Michel. The season of la giboulée, the sudden showers heralding spring.

Too bad she’d forgotten her rain boots.

Cars and buses stalled as she hit road closures on the Left Bank. Bright road construction lights illumined crews excavating the sewer lines. Street after narrow street.

Frustrated, she detoured uphill, winding through the Latin Quarter, then zigzagging across to the south of Paris, former countryside squeezed between wall fortifications now demolished; past the old Observatoire, two-story houses, remnants of prewar factories leaving an urban patchwork.

Clouds scudded over the slanted rooftops, the chimney pots like pepper shakers over the grilled balconies. Avenues led to tree-lined lanes in this neighborhood, fronting hidden village-like pockets of what her grandfather called “the Parisians’ Paris.”

Her shoulders knotted in irritation. She didn’t have time for this scenic detour. Down wide Avenue du Général Leclerc, through the nodding shadows cast by trees and clouds of chestnut pollen, past the Métro signs and the steps of l’Eglise Saint Pierre de Montrouge. Into a logjam. Horns blared. Protesters chanting “Stop the developers!” and wearing La Coalition armbands blocked part of rue d’Alésia, a street known to fashionistas for designer markdowns. Of course, a demonstration!

Great. No way she’d get through this banner-waving crowd on her Vespa. She downshifted and wove through protesters, desperate for a parking place. It took a good five minutes, then another five until on foot she turned into cobbled Villa d’Alésia. She paused where the narrow lane twisted to the right, past the two-story ateliers. Quiet. A world away from the street protest. Clouds above fretted the cobblestones with a patchwork of light.

Further on, she saw a woman rattling Yuri’s front gate. What was going on? Her stomach churned.

The older woman, in a mink coat over a purple jogging suit, gripped the grilled gate with one hand, beckoned her with the other. “Viens, Mademoiselle.”

“Something wrong? Is Monsieur Volodya all right?”

The woman, her dark penciled eyebrows at odds with her thinning brown hair, stared at Aimée, her mouth pursed. “All that yelling! Disturbed you too, non?”

Nonplussed, Aimée nodded.

“It’s overcast and you wear dark glasses?”

“The optometrist dilated my eyes this morning,” Aimée improvised, removing them and sticking them in her pocket. “But Yuri …?”

“Worried me, too,” the woman interrupted. “His water pipe’s flooding my wall and balcony again. A mess. Not the first time. But I’ve called.…”

The screech of a police car’s brakes coming to a halt in front of them drowned her out.

“You reported this, Madame?” asked the arriving flic, motioning to his partner. Aimée wondered how they’d gotten through the congested demonstration.

“The commotion disturbed her too.” The woman gestured to Aimée. “All this yelling in the middle of the morning.”

The woman took Aimée for a neighbor. She kept talking, but the flic and his partner ignored her. With a sense of foreboding, Aimée followed them inside, her ankle boots sloshing in water. A flood all right.

“Monsieur?”

Over the blue-uniformed officer’s shoulders, Aimée saw Yuri bent over the gushing kitchen sink. His bloody arms were tied with a necktie to the faucet. She gasped. Rivulets of red-tinged water streamed onto the floor, eddying around her boots.

The first flic rushed to turn off the gushing taps. It took him several attempts to unknot the tie and hoist the old man down. Yuri’s blackened eyes were swollen shut, his face cut and bruised, his distended tongue thick and blue. His hair, plastered to his head, dripped water.

“Mon Dieu.” Aimée’s hand flew to her mouth. “I’m too late.”

“What’s that, Mademoiselle?”

She shook her head. Instinct told her to keep her mouth shut. She wondered who’d tortured the old man in broad daylight.

Trying to piece it together didn’t stop her knees from knocking or the shivers from running up her spine. A familiar floral note—like muguet, lily of the valley—floated in the damp atelier. Her mother’s scent. Then a piercing scream—Aimée jumped as the woman in the mink coat appeared in the hallway, pointing, her face crinkled in horror. The policier called for backup, speaking into the microphone on his collar.

“Take your neighbor outside, will you?” he said. “We’ll talk to you both when backup arrives.”

Her unlicensed Beretta felt heavy in her bag. A good time to make herself scarce. Guiding the sobbing woman, Aimée sloshed through the ebbing water. Just last night she’d sat here with Yuri. The vodka bottle and glasses were still on the table. But the card she’d left was gone.

Good God, what if the killer had taken it?

A broken chair, waterlogged books, and the armoire on its side showed evidence of a struggle. Had the thieves come back for the painting they hadn’t found last night? Or had her mother? And if her mother was involved in this, who was she involved with—Yuri, or whoever killed him?

Chilled, she pushed that thought away.

Only forty or fifty minutes had passed since she’d spoken with him. It made no sense. Last night his shock over his stolen painting had seemed genuine. Why torture him for a painting already stolen? Why had he called her and changed his mind? Saddened, she thought of her last image of Yuri Volodya, holding her card in his hands. Now she’d never get to ask him any of her questions.

“Just like in the war,” the woman said, her shoulders heaving.

Tense, Aimée put her arm around her. “What do you mean?”

“Standard torture by les Boches,” the woman said. “That’s how they got information from my brother. They tortured him in a bathtub on rue de Saussaies. Left him on our doorstep.”

Aimée only had a few minutes before backup arrived. She and her Beretta needed to be as far from here as possible. “Let me take you home, they’ll want to question us.”

She escorted the woman up her stairs. “You heard Yuri yelling?”

“But you heard it too,” she said.

“Bien sûr.” Aimée needed to keep the woman talking. “It bothered my dog, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying.”

“Who could, unless you speak Russian.”

How did this add up? “You speak Russian, Madame?”

“Les Russes filled the quartier once,” she said. “A generation or two ago, I don’t remember.”

Lining the walls of the stairwell were faded amateurish watercolors of pastoral countryside and villages with canals. Painted long ago on holidays, she imagined.

“My brother painted those,” the woman said, noticing Aimée’s gaze.

Aimée nodded. “So talented, your brother.”

“Then, in 1943, that afternoon, gone.…” Her words trailed off.

Outside, Aimée heard car engines.

Both the woman’s brother and Yuri had been tortured in the same way. A link? Or maybe someone wanted it to appear that way? She’d think about that later. In the few minutes before the flics arrived she needed to pry information out of this woman. “Poor Yuri. He had so little.…”

“ ‘Sitting in sweet butter,’ Yuri said to me,” the woman interrupted, reaching the first-floor landing. She opened her door and hung up her mink coat. Warmth and the smell of apples drifted from inside this atelier, which was similar to Yuri’s. Aimée guided her toward a chair as the woman dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “Bien sûr, his wife’s son, he’s been sniffing around. The type who wants the butter and the money to buy it.”

An old saying of her grand-mère’s. Aimée hadn’t heard it in years. She remembered Yuri’s comment on his daughter-in-law’s cement blinis.

“Mark my words, look to family,” the woman said. “That’s what those crime shows say.”

“What sweet butter?” Aimée fingered her bag’s leather strap. “Yuri won the lotto?”

The woman dabbed her eyes again. Shrugged.

A painting so valuable Yuri had been tortured for it. Did that make sense? Aimée needed to press. This woman might have more information, a crucial detail.

“Mais following his father’s funeral, he acted differently,” the woman said. “Didn’t you notice? After he visited the old Russian nursing home?”

A knock sounded on the door. The flics. Flustered, Aimée took a stab in the dark. “Ah, you mean that painting he inherited from his father, non? Seemed to worry him?”

“Not too much. Talked big after that, don’t you remember?” Her eyes narrowed. “Where do you live, eh? I haven’t seen you around.”

“Juste à côté,” Aimée said. Time to get the hell out of here. “May I use the ladies’ before we talk to the flics, Madame?”

More knocking.

“End of the hall.”

Aimée found no window in the bathroom. Cursed under her breath. She peeked out the door. Saw the woman’s back. Tiptoed to the small kitchen and the back door, opened it to the dripping-wet balcony.

One floor down. She grabbed the metal balcony bars, let her legs dangle in the late morning air. Next door she saw Yuri’s lighted atelier through a tall window. She took a deep breath and dropped, landing in wet grass. Mud and grass caked her boot heels.

Great.

A walkway led through the small courtyard. She scanned the back building windows for neighbors. Lace panels covered many of the closed windows. Too cold and wet for hanging laundry. Satisfied no one was looking out, she passed through an old gate and scaled a cracked stone wall to land on mud. Again.

A damp, trampled rosemary bush lay in her path. The fragrance enveloped her.

Her view at the garden’s rear gave onto Yuri’s kitchen. She could crouch down undetected—but for how long? Arriving blue uniforms filled the atelier. At any moment they’d start taping off the apartment, spread into the garden.

Something wet and fragrant brushed her cheek. A broken sprig of rosemary stuck from the wall. Rosemary for remembrance, and she had so much to remember. Stalling, she picked up the rosemary and examined it. Wound around the stem was a bit of yellow grass. Straw? No, more like hay. She had a sudden intuition it was the murderer who had trampled this rosemary, perhaps coming over the wall the same way she just had. She stuck the hay-tangled sprig in her pocket.

Right now only one thing was clear: She had to find this painting Yuri was tortured for that somehow led to her mother. Saj was in the clear for the accident now, or would be once Serge filed his report. Yet Aimée couldn’t be sure he was safe until she knew who the Serb who’d tracked him down to the hospital had been. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the dead Serb and the missing painting were linked. Besides, even if they weren’t, she was caught up in this case now—she’d missed the old man’s call, and now he was dead. His five thousand francs sat in her bag. She couldn’t shake her feeling of guilt, not to mention her regret at losing her one link to her mother.

The neighbor’s window opened. A finger pointed. “She’s over there.…”

Aimée took off and didn’t hear the rest.





Monday Afternoon, Silicon Valley


“WE’VE BUILT THE mainframe. Your job’s maintenance so we can go back in and tweak it. Anything you need, René.” Andy slapped him on the back, then followed up with a hug. So California men like to hug?

As if reading his mind, Andy laughed. “We’re not kissers, like you froggies. But we’re totally jazzed to have you as our CTO. Just remember, we need that back door for routine maintenance.” He hugged René again. “Anything you need, dude.”

Excited, René nodded. Dudes, cowboys—alors, this was the Wild West.

Andy peace-signed his way out.

Andy the long-haired CFO and Rob the investor angel were two of the most brilliant people René had ever met. Within five minutes of meeting them, he’d known there was no one like them in France. The company had algorithms a year ahead of any he’d seen. Their one problem was keeping people from getting in. His job: to make their security top-notch.

René cranked up his ergonomic chair at his new desk in what had been the car dealership’s assistant’s office. The room emanated fresh paint and glue from newly laid carpet. A leftover Buick Skylark calendar adorned the wall.

With his chief tech officer position came the company laptop, two desktop terminals, and keys to the former coffee room, which now housed the bank of computers. The beating heart of their stock-trading search-engine start-up. His start-up, too—he owned shares.

René glowed inside. Their genius concept was perfectly timed to crest the oncoming wave of stock trading. He kept wanting to pinch himself.

A few more algorithms, and he’d complete the security firewall. A real beauty. He savored a challenge.

He rubbed his hands together at the keyboard. Splat! Warm liquid dripped from his cuff-linked sleeve. He’d knocked the cup of what they called “coffee” over.

Merde.

By the time he reached the restroom, he’d figured out part of the code for the next algorithm in his head. But the big problem right now was the sink’s high faucet—out of his reach. Had they built this for giants?

Non, just big Americans. He’d need a stool to reach it so he could wash off his stained, dripping sleeve. Hunting for anything to stand on, he ended up in the back storeroom. The cooling system whirred.

“He’s perfect. The mainframe security’s almost there.”

René stopped in his tracks. Someone was speaking of his work. Pride filled his chest. The voice spoke at intervals. Like a cell phone conversation.

“He’s brilliant but we won’t.…” Loud whirring drowned the rest. René’s gaze caught on a Pepsi crate. “He’s set up.…” More whirring. “… front running.” With all the background noise, he couldn’t recognize the voice. “The dwarf’s got no idea.”

René’s hands paused on the crate. What did that mean?

He walked through the storeroom, following the sound of a door shutting. EXIT. He opened the door, blinked into blinding sunlight to find the parking lot. He couldn’t see over the hoods but heard an engine start up. By the time he reached the middle of the lot, the car was gone.

Had he misunderstood with all the noise? Or his bad English? But the thumping in his chest didn’t go away.

Courtesy of the Pepsi crate, he cleaned up at the sink. He mulled over what he’d just heard while scrubbing out the stain. Wished he understood English better, and that his other Charvet handmade shirt wasn’t in the motel on the street of fleas.

He cleaned his cuff as well as he could and returned the crate. Waiting for him in his office stood a Nordic-looking blonde. He did a double take. She held a steaming café au lait in a Styrofoam cup.

“We knew you’d prefer this, René.” She grinned. Handed it to him and squeezed his arm. Wide hazel eyes, legs to forever. “We’re here for you. I’m Susie, head programmer. My personal mission is to make sure you’re happy.”

He fell in love right there. His dream of California in the flesh. A coup de foudre standing in that car dealership garage-cum-office still emanating oil fumes. “I’ll drop by your office later, okay?”

Back at his desk his mind spun in love. Or lust. He didn’t know. He sipped the café au lait. It tasted perfect, like he imagined she would. Her hair would smell of sunshine.

Why couldn’t his English be better? His mind went back to the storeroom. Of course he’d misunderstood.

He finished writing the algorithm. Tested it. But he couldn’t get the phrase he’d overheard out of his mind—The dwarf’s got no idea.





Tuesday Midday, Paris


HEAD DOWN, AIMÉE hurried down rue d’Alésia, merging with the chanting protesters. Her midnight-blue phone rang. Maxence.

The security reports, the systems monitoring … good God, she’d entrusted it all to a kid. Worried, she pressed TALK. “Anything wrong, Maxence?”

“No, but the funeral mass for Piotr Volodya—”

“Who’s that?” she interrupted.

“Yuri Volodya’s father, who died at one hundred last week,” Maxence said. “Big to-do out at the Russian nursing home. Le Figaro’s obituary makes him out to be some kind of art connoisseur. Instrumental in the art movement in the twenties, apparently. That’s the most recent hit I found.”

Not bad, this kid.

“What did the old Russian say?” Maxence asked.

Her heart clenched. “Tell you later. If anyone calls, you don’t know where I am. Take a message.” She took a breath. “Keep researching. Find out how active Yuri was in political groups in the seventies.” Her mother’s time. “How’s it going with the reports?”

She spied her scooter where she’d left it. A police car turned into the street ahead of her. She kept her head low as it passed.

“Printed out, filed, and backed up on René’s computer.”

Already? The kid took initiative. “Mind running the next batch? And give me a status update midway, d’accord?”

En route to her scooter she had an idea. “Maxence, where’s that Russian nursing home?”

MORE THAN AN hour and two wrong turns later, Aimée located the Château de la Cossonnerie, outside Paris, now the nursing home adjoining the Russian cemetery. She downshifted past the grilled gate into a circular gravel-lined driveway and parked her scooter to the side of the tall limestone building. Her pulse raced. She was determined to discover how Yuri got “in butter” and then murdered. And how it involved her mother, if it did.

The deserted reception area—dark maroon chairs and matching wallpaper under a high ceiling bordered by faded gilt woodwork—exuded dim gloom. The back office lay dark. Paprika aromas drifted from the hallway, a low hum of clinking cutlery. Lunchtime. Didn’t old people eat early? Not a bad idea. Her stomach growled. But she saw no computer to search for patients’ names and rooms. Under a vase holding heavily scented freesias, she found the visitor log.

She wished the reception area offered more light as she searched the dates. But going back a few days she found a Piotr Volodya, Room 34, and Yuri’s scrawled signature. Better to question a fellow patient who’d known him. She’d get more info that way than from a staff member bound by confidentiality and privacy laws.

An orderly in white appeared in the hallway pushing a lunch cart. Behind him a woman, wiping the sides of her mouth with a napkin, bustled in from the dining room.

“You wish to tour, make an appointment?” Red, flowing curls framed her round, highly blushed face. Buxom and sealed into a green dress with shoulder pads, she could have stepped out of the eighties. “I’m Madame Gobulansky, la directrice.”

“Aimée Leduc. It’s regarding the late Piotr Volodya’s estate.”

Madame Gobulansky played with her drop earrings. Wary.

“Estate? The man lived on charity here the last twenty years. Who do you represent?”

From her tone it sounded like Piotr had overstayed his welcome. Aimée flashed her détective privé card.

“A private detective?” Her lipsticked mouth pursed. “No crime’s been committed here. I don’t understand. Unless you’re some vulture hired by his son.”

Aimée kept her impatience down. “Madame, could you talk with me about Piotr Volodya?”

“We’ve got seventy-eight beds,” Madame Gobulansky said. “And a waiting list. Neither I nor my staff discusses former patients.”

La directrice covered her derrière. Yet, after coming all this way, Aimée wouldn’t give up.

“But I can speak with residents who knew Piotr, his friends. No regulation against that?” Aimée smiled and kept on talking. “Perhaps the resident across from Piotr’s room, number thirty four. Yuri spoke fondly of—”

“The only time we saw his son, Yuri, was before the funeral.” Her lipstick smudged on her teeth.

“I’m acting on Yuri’s behalf. He’s the heir.…” Aimée looked down the hallway. Still deserted for lunch. “Alors, I wouldn’t want to cause any unpleasantness or create unnecessary paperwork. Or raise a judicial complaint.”

“We’re a private foundation, Mademoiselle.”

Aimée smiled. “Then you won’t object to me having a casual conversation.”

Madame Gobulansky sighed. “If you mean Madame Natasha …”

Madame Natasha? Aimée nodded. “Mais oui,” she said. “Where is she?”

“Where Madame Natasha always sits at lunchtime.” La directrice’s features became impassive. “For the last five years while Piotr was bedridden, she remained his companion. I’ll introduce you.”

Helpful now, Madame Gobulansky guided her across the hallway. Either Aimée had scared Madame la directrice or she’d cooked the wrong rabbit, as her father would say, and was getting fobbed off. “Just a moment, s’il vous plaît.”

Companion? Aimée wondered.

The nursing home was a museum. To the right swept a nineteenth-century staircase, brass rods holding dark maroon carpeting in place. Lining the hallway were oil portraits of Empress Catherine II, Emperors Alexander I, II, and III, a marble bust of Nicholas II, and an oil painting of tight-lipped Alexandra Fédorovna. In the corners clung a musty old-world smell. From another age, a vanished tsarist Russia of long ago. The only things missing were the cobwebs and Cossacks.

Her nose crinkled at the old-people smell that the disinfectant didn’t cover.

Madame Gobulansky beckoned her inside before disappearing in a rustle of polyester.

The high-ceilinged salon held a cloying old-lady rose scent and a large télé. On the screen played a ballet—vintage black-and-white reels without sound.

“Bonjour, Madame, maybe you can help me.”

“Moi?” Madame Natasha, in a wheelchair with an oxygen tube clipped to her nose, was applying mascara. “God blesses those who help themselves.” A fine dust of wrinkles covered her otherwise taut, translucent face. Her clawlike fingers wavered. Aimée wanted to reach out and guide the mascara comb.

“Not bad for ninety-eight, eh?” She gave a quavering laugh. “Go ahead, tell me I don’t look a day over eighty.”

“You don’t.” Aimée smiled. Must have been a beauty in her day. Clear sapphire eyes, erect posture in the wheelchair. Hopefully her mind was as clear.

“May I take a few minutes of your time?”

“Time? But that’s all I have now.” She pointed to the télé screen. “Of course, you came to hear my stories of the Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo. That’s me, the third from the left.”

Aimée stifled a groan. “Fascinating. But I’d like to know about Piotr Volodya. I hear you were his companion.”

“Where’s Piotr gone?” She tugged a crocheted throw over her withered legs. “He’s late.”

Late?

“His son Yuri sent me.” A semi-truth.

“That son who never visits him?” Natasha put down her mascara. “I outlived four husbands.” Natasha gave a theatrical sigh. The corners of her wrinkled red lips turned down. “We’re engaged. See my ring from Piotr.” Natasha flashed a blue-veined hand with a garish red stone like a cherry on her swollen, arthritic middle finger. Not even glass.

“Exquisite.” Aimée stared, her heart sinking.

“Spoils of the tsar.” Madame Natasha leaned over her wheelchair arm. “We must speak in code. They’re listening.”

No wonder Madame Gobulansky had complied, Aimée thought. The old biddy drifted through time with a good dose of paranoia.

“Who’s listening?”

“The Okhrana. The tsar’s secret police.” She put a thin finger to her lips. Nodded. “Piotr knows. Lenin told him.”

The white-tutu’d ballerinas flickered on the screen. Great. A ninety-eight-year-old ballerina with dementia.

Natasha’s lips parted in a wide smile. For a moment the years fell away. “Men have always given me things.”

Aimée scanned the dull gold icons on the walls, an assemblage of pastel and watercolor paintings. In the corner a bronze samovar bubbled and steamed.

“Can you tell me about Piotr and Yuri’s relationship?”

“After we have tea, Mademoiselle.”

Aimée contained her impatience as Natasha wheeled herself to the samovar. She passed Aimée a steaming cup of tea with a cube of sugar. “Suck. Like this.”

Aimée followed suit, propping the cube between her tongue and teeth as Natasha did. The Kusmi Russian tea trickled down her throat like a sweet, wet, smoky breath.

Natasha opened a worn scrapbook with yellowed ballet programs, thrust it at Aimée. The last thing she wanted to see.

“Diaghilev worked us hard, let me tell you. Olga, my garret mate, married Picasso, you know. They met while he was designing our ballet,” Natasha said. “He ignored me, thank God, the little toad with a barrel chest. Diaghilev’s buried out in the cemetery. Nureyev too, that upstart. Rudi was charming when he wanted to be, but I heard he was a devil to work with.”

Sad, but Aimée hadn’t come for wistful historical remembrances. The fact that Yuri had been murdered so soon after his father’s death meant something.

“Let’s get back to Piotr’s relationship with Yuri,” Aimée said, setting her cup down. “Wasn’t there a painting?”

“Shhh. Piotr’s on a mission.”

And he wouldn’t be coming back.

“But you must know the code or you wouldn’t be here,” Natasha said.

Best to play along with her. Learn something. “Bien sûr, but Yuri said.…”

“Yuri knows only part of the code. I let him think he understood. It’s all in the letter.”

“Letter?” Aimée took a closer look at the scrapbook. Opened the back pages. “One of these?” Stuck in between were yellowed parchment envelopes with old canceled stamps addressed to Mademoiselle Natasha Petrovsky.

“Not my old love letters.” A flicker of the gamine crossed her eyes. “Les pneus.”

A code? So far she’d gotten nowhere. And then, wedged in the scrapbook, she saw a letter addressed to Monsieur Piotr Volodya postmarked Paris, March 1920.

Natasha glanced toward the samovar. “More tea?”

“Non, merci,” said Aimée, slipping the letter in her pocket. “Les pneus? I don’t understand.”

“A pity. The two hadn’t spoken in years. But Yuri was in such a rush that day.”

Aimée saw an opening. “That’s why I’m here. Piotr told you his stories, non? He left Yuri a painting from his collection.”

Natasha took another sugar cube between her teeth. A good set of dentures, Aimée figured. Natasha’s gaze wandered. Her neck muscles quivered under thin white skin.

Aimée leaned forward. She needed this old woman to open up. “Wasn’t Piotr instrumental in the twenties avant-garde art movement?”

“Instrumental? Piotr was a penniless Russian émigré from the shtetl. Just a classic émigré story.” Natasha waved her thin blue-veined hands. “In those days, after the Revolution, you’d find a prince driving a taxi.” She sighed. “Piotr served … how do you say it, like a waiter in a bistro where destitute artists—all famous now—paid for meals with their paintings.”

Natasha sounded rational. As if she’d heard this story many times.

“Worth a fortune now, I’d imagine,” Aimée said.

“A franc a dozen then. You call that instrumental in the avant-garde?” Natasha’s tone turned petulant. “Piotr’s supposed to help me. Awful man, late again.” She pushed her wheelchair back. “But you young know the price of everything, not the value. See art as merchandise to trade and sell.”

Surprised, Aimée shook her head. “I don’t understand. Didn’t Piotr pass his painting collection to Yuri?”

“You sound just like Yuri’s stepson.”

Aimée’s mind went back to Yuri’s neighbor’s words—how Oleg the stepson had been buzzing around him like a fly lately.

“Oleg’s no friend of mine,” Aimée said. How could she make sense of the strands running through the old woman’s words? To do that, she’d need to gain her trust. “As you know, Piotr’s on a mission. I came to assist.”

“But the code.…” Natasha’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “I thought you knew.”

The old woman went from rational to irrational in seconds. Would Aimée have that to look forward to if she lived as long?

“There are more letters, n’est-ce pas?”

“Like everything else, I had to keep them for him. They’re somewhere, of course.”

Letters that should have been given to Yuri. Letters that could authenticate the painting, she imagined.

“All his talk about drinking la fée vert,” Natasha said.

La fée vert, the green fairy, the old name for absinthe. Where did that come from?

“Absinthe’s been outlawed a long time,” Aimée said.

“All those drinks at la Rotonde with the artists, poets, revolutionaries, anarchists,” Natasha said. “Montparnasse in the old days. The good old days. As if Piotr knew.”

Aimée started to put things together.

“Tall tales, eh? Or you believed him?”

“Piotr loved recounting how Lenin bounced him on his knee. The way Modigliani wore a red scarf and danced on the table.”

Aimée remembered that lesson in history class about the Russian Revolution. 1917. She calculated mentally that Piotr, if one hundred years old, would have.…

“I’m tired,” Natasha said. She clicked the remote and the télé went dark.

Instead of leaving, she could go along with the old biddy and search for more letters.

“Let me take you to your room,” Aimée said.