The French Kiss (16 page)

Though maybe that was because he got his ole buddy Cage to hear his last confession.

Roll it back then, a couple of decades and then some, to where I came in. I've called it the last of the funky summers, and it was a pretty weird time. Another war was starting up, people said it was the beginning of Big Three, but to those of us who were eligible to fight it or almost, it was bugoutsville, fuck it, every man for himself. As far as Mrs. Cage's boy was concerned, I took off the day after my junior year in high school, leaving a good-by note pinned to the Post Toasties. I worked my way south, the length of the great and sovereign state of California. I got laid in Pershing Square, got the crap pounded out of me in Echo Park, and thumbed my way east across the desert with nothing in my wallet but a pack of safes and two draft cards, one of which said eighteen, the other twenty-one, and both of them fake. In Kingman, Arizona, I signed on with a pipeline crew. I worked, ate, slept, and gambled with a bunch of oversized aztecs and apaches until I had two hundred and fifty bucks clear. Then I headed some ninety miles up the road, to Paradise.

Paradise? Well, they called it Vegas, too. Maybe the Flamingo had only just gone up, and surely nobody in town had even heard of Howard Hughes, but to a red-blooded youth with cash money in his jeans, it was Baghdad, Gomorrah, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa all rolled into one. The neon popped your eyeballs. You could eat your fill of steak for a couple of bucks and see a show at the same time. They had these cute little dealers with lacquered fingernails sharp enough to cut the Ace of Spades in two, and those who weren't dealing came around every half hour or so with drinks on the house. Plus slot machines in every head, metal dollars instead of paper, and everybody talking about some old stiff too drunk to walk who'd run $50 into $13,000 at the Golden Nugget the night before.

I took the Governor's Suite in the biggest hotel on Fremont, cash on the barrelhead. Then I decked myself out like Napoleon on the eve of Austerlitz and set out to parlay Cage's Sure-Thing Blackjack System into a trip to Mexico or Rio or pretty much anywhere south of Yakima, Washington, where they had hot and cold running maids and champagne in the spigots.

About eighteen hours and maybe thirty-six white lightnings later, I remember the cute little dealer tapping her fingernail on the felt to see if I was up. I remember fumbling through my pockets and coming up with what was left of a one-way bus ticket to nowhere. I remember that the cute little dealer's lips were as red as her fingernails and that she had black eyes and black shiny hair. And that's the last thing I remember until I woke up the next morning, if it was morning, dry-mouthed and sick-bellied, on the deep pile rug of the Governor's Suite, with this dude who'd been playing next to me konked out on His Excellency's bed.

We introduced ourselves. Al, meet B. F. Cage. Cagey, meet Al Dovici, in cowboy boots and chinos.

We inventoried our remaining assets. These consisted of our clothes and my bus ticket. We went down to the depot and traded in what was left of the bus ticket for a couple of platters of scrambled eggs and hashed browns. But then we were tapped out and walking the streets, touchy as a pair of ovulating broads and itching all over from that big gnawing get-even gambler's feeling. The sickness is short, and no junkie ever had it worse.

Until we ran into Denise.

Actually she was a schoolteacher on vacation, and she wasn't half bad. She came from somewhere in Wisconsin. She drove one of those coffee-grinder '47 Fords. She fed us and shared her motel room with us and just about everything else except her hoard. She gave us a couple of bucks a day for walking-around money. It would last us maybe fifteen minutes and then we'd come begging, but she said she wasn't about to let a couple of underage losers blow her year's savings. So mostly we watched her, at roulette, and in between spins of the wheel we took turns balling her. But after a few days of balling and watching, the itch was driving us clean out of our sockets.

Then she decided to take a day off, if it was okay with us. It was okay with us. We loaded the back of the Ford with as much beer as it could hold and drove down to Lake Mead. It's a beautiful spot, Lake Mead, even if it is man-made, and Boulder Dam holds it all together. We swam, and baked in the sun, and played grabass in the shallow water, and drank beer, swam some more, drank some more, and when we ran out of beer all three of us fell asleep.

Except for Al and me.

He looked at me, and I looked at him.

“C'mon Cagey,” he said. “It's bug-out time.'

We sold the Ford to a moon-faced aztec in Vegas who would have paid you 25 percent of value for your town fire engine. Then we got on a bus for Reno, where Al said the real action was, and where the first and last of the funky summers came to an abrupt halt, about six
A.M.
one late August morning.

I remember it well. We'd had our run. We'd doubled our stake, then doubled the doubled, but before you could say eighter from Decatur, the dice went stone-age cold in our hands. I remember him turning away from the table, red-eyed, and feeling not the sickness any more, just done in, wasted, and him laying it on me:

“Fuck it, Cagey. Let's join the fucking army and get it over with.”

We had to lie about our age, but all the recruiters did in those cannon-fodder days was count your eyes. We went through basic training together and a couple of months later the two of us and a few thousand other young braves were paddling west across the dark and deep Pacific to save the free world.

Only Al Dovici managed to get off in Japan. How I never quite knew at the time, only that it was one of those now-you-see-me-now-you-don't deals, because one morning he was present and accounted for in the replacement company and the next, another sorry stiff was standing in his place. In between there'd been an all-night poker game. Oh yes, and the other sorry stiff was me. I had a one-way ticket to a place called Kunuri, Korea, and when I got there a padded Chinaman on horseback punched me the rest of the way through to Prison Camp Number Five up at Pyoktong, and if it was too long a walk to get there for Christmas, I had the next one and the one after to make up for it.

I used to think about him in the bad times. I could see the pair of dice in his palm, hear him sweet-talking them. I used to wonder what would have happened if one of those snake eyes had rolled over on its back and come up a six. Or if the dealer with the red fingernails had slipped me an ace to go with my king instead of a trey. Or if I'd read William Shakespeare in high school instead of Captain Marvel. Then Al would butt in in my mind, in the middle of one of those bullshit conversations we'd had about what we were going to do after the war, saying:
A private eye? Geezus, Cagey, you must be out of your mind!
Because he'd had us opening up the biggest chain of cathouses the West Coast had ever seen, all the way from Puget Sound to Chula Vista. And I'd wonder if he'd organized Yokohama for starters. But then the day came when his hitch would have been up, mine too, and after that I stopped thinking about him as much as I could, and about mostly everything.

I ran into him again in San Francisco, late in 1953. I'd been all over the country, courtesy of the U.S. Army, telling my ugly story about the Communist statements I'd signed as far east as Washington, D.C., and to no one under the rank of major. It was still up for grabs whether they were going to let me go or put me to making little rocks out of big for the next ten years or so. In the end they chose the first solution, but under conditions “other than honorable,” which meant among other things that I never could get that investigator's license I hankered after. Or so I thought then, and by the time I found out who to pay off, I no longer gave a damn.

In any case, by 1953 Al Dove was already running a string of hookers in and out of the Broadway saloons. Later on he traded the girls in for cars, then the cars for dope, the dope for real estate, the real estate finally for art, but the scenario was always the same: the action was always terrific, the mob was involved somewhere, and there was always plenty of room in it for his ole buddy Cage.

Only his ole buddy Cage never forgot, did he?

No, probably he didn't. Not even when he finally got his own thing together. Not certainly after that boozy reunion on Broadway in San Francisco, 1953, when Al Dove told him his version of what had happened in Japan.

There'd been a poker game all right in the replacement company, an all-nighter, and for the first and maybe only time in his life Al Dove had gotten out at the right time. He'd taken them all, but none more than a certain sergeant whom he'd cleaned right down to his socks, and then some. When the time came to settle up, he was holding a fistful of the sergeant's markers. This had created quite a ticklish problem. To which, however, there was one simple solution. The sergeant had finally agreed. In exchange for the markers, he simply struck the name of Dovici from a certain roster. What Al hadn't realized, he said, was that somebody else was going to have to go in his place, and by the time he found out that the somebody was his ole buddy Cage, they'd already pulled up the anchor and thrown away the gangplank.

No, I guess I never forgot. Not even a couple of decades later in the Paris métro, when the real story came pouring out.

Actually, his setup for that night had been just as simple. The métro shuts down a little after one
A.M.
Shortly after the passage of the last train, the station attendant makes his final rounds, wakes up the bums, turns off the lights, then closes and chains the metal grilles across the entrance and snaps shut the padlocks and abandons the joint to the rats. Al Dove had paid the attendant to keep the grilles open till he came out. The way he'd had it figured, his parley with his ole buddy Cage could have taken one of several turns, but no matter what happened he'd have his escape route, and by the time I found mine he'd have been long gone.

What is it they say about history repeating itself?

Only this time it had blown. This time Helen Raven held the markers, and he hadn't planned on her showing up to collect, much less leaving him with a hole in his shoulder. Maybe you could say he'd been there before, in spots as tight and tighter, and had managed to wriggle through. But this time he had no wriggle left, only a lot of whimper and cower, plus a confession the size of the Matterhorn weighing on his brain.

First though, armed with his cannon and my matches, I left him and went up the exit stairs. If the Professor was hiding in a broom closet, she didn't come out. The ticket booth was empty, the door to it locked, and so was every other door I found. I vaulted over the turnstiles and came up against the first of two grilles, one at the bottom of the steps up to the street, the other at the top. Both were padlocked. It wasn't hard to imagine the attendant's reaction when the Professor changed his instructions. I saw the gray glow of the upstairs world through the grilles, heard the sporadic sounds of traffic. Maybe I could have shot our way out, but that's a trickier business than they make it out in the movies, and the last thing I wanted right then was company, particularly in uniform.

Finally I made my way back down to the platform. The light was better there. I realized that it came from the single bulbs strung at intervals through the tunnels. Al Dove was slumped forward on the bench. His shirt was damp but more from sweat, I judged, than blood. I tore the sleeve of it off his good side and made a makeshift bandage with it, lit one of his cigarettes for him, then went to the booth. It wasn't my day for telephones though. I didn't get so much as a bleep out of the receiver, and no combination of numbers I tried produced a dial tone. The line was dead. The choice, as far as I could see, came down then to trying to shoot off the padlocks or waiting till the system opened up again in the early morning.

But Al Dove had another idea.

I checked it out on the métro map with one of my last matches. It looked feasible enough.

“All right,” I said, coming back to where he was sitting, “let's get to going. We've got some walking to do.”

“Who? Me?”

He laughed—a short sound that ended up in a cough. He shook his head. He said he couldn't make it. There'd be some acrobatics at the end, even if he got that far he couldn't handle the acrobatics. And what for anyway? What the hell for? He was tired of running. If Helen Raven didn't get him, he had some friends back in California who would, sooner or later. He was washed up and hurting, and all he wanted was for me to leave him the gun in case Helen Raven came back.

I told him that was so much bullshit. He may have been hurting, but he wasn't about to croak. I told him Helen Raven wasn't coming back. I told him I thought he might still have a crack at his payoff, at least the cash part. I told him I could carry him out if need be.

But he wasn't having any of it. And then, all of a sudden, it came gushing out of him, punctuated by sobbing and coughing: that ugly spew of true confession that people think is all the world needs to set it right. The gist of it was that he'd lied to me all those years before. He'd been in the poker game all right, and he'd cleaned up, but when the sergeant agreed to the deal, he'd insisted on a substitute, somebody with the same MOS. The sergeant had had a body count to fill, he hadn't cared who he filled it with as long as the numbers came out right. And Al Dove had given him …

… his ole buddy Cage.

“I did it as a joke, Cagey!” he whined at me. “I swear! I thought it was just a joke! Geezus Christ, I even remember the son of a bitch's name! Sergeant Kiminy! I can't forget it! Sergeant Francis Fucking Kiminy!”

He'd started to shiver. I put my raincoat around him. I told him it was all right, and hearing myself say it, I guessed that it was. Either it had happened too long ago, or somehow I'd known all along. Oh, I was a regular old mother to him.