“Please enter, madame.” Maxim opened a door behind me and I went into one of the sorriest rooms I’d ever seen. I had grown up in an Irish peasant’s cottage. Our life had been simple in the extreme but we had a good stove, the pots were polished sparkling clean, our battered furniture was also polished and decorated with pillows made from scraps. In short it was a friendly, homey sort of place. This room was barely furnished, with no adornments. The floor was bare, with uneven boards, and in the far corner was an unmade iron bedstead. The only saving grace was a window that looked out across the city, letting light stream in. Under the window was a table with half a loaf of dark bread, next to a palette of paints, a brush still lying across it. A canvas on an easel still glistened with wet paint. There was no sign of the mysterious Jojo. Maxim had spirited her away.

“Madame. Please sit.” He motioned to a wobbly cane chair. “I would offer you some tea, but alas I have no spirit for my little stove. As you can see our life here is… how you say… simple?”

I nodded.

“But if I sell a painting soon, all will be well. Your friend, Mademoiselle Goldfarb, she promises to take some of my paintings back to New York when she departs. She is very kind and very rich, no?”

I was about to say she wasn’t very rich, just comfortably situated, then I realized that to Maxim she would appear to be so. As he spoke I was studying the paintings tacked to the walls. The man downstairs was right—they were gloomy in the extreme. Great gashes of dark colors, mouths open in screams, burning houses, strange flying figures. They were the stuff of nightmare.

“It was a lucky day that we met at the poetry reading, don’t you think? Imagine—Miss Goldfarb searches the whole of Paris for her cousins and doesn’t find them, and then we meet by chance.”

I was still examining the bleakness of the studio. “What about the rest of your family?” I asked. “Are they not still in Paris?”

“All dead.” He sighed. “My parents died when I was a child. I ended up in the orphanage. Not a pleasant place.”

“I’m so sorry. That’s why you paint such sad scenes.”

“I have seen much sadness. Family is important, don’t you think? Family is the most important thing in the world.”

“I suppose it is. I too have no family but my husband and child, so I know how it feels.”

He nodded. “I am so happy to find a cousin. Mademoiselle Goldfarb tells me that my family in New York has done well. I am glad for them.”

“Yes, I believe they have prospered. Sid doesn’t talk about them much. They don’t approve of her lifestyle.”