The French Kiss (18 page)

I told him to keep it.

The cabbie had worked his way about halfway through the wine. I helped him finish it. On the first swallow I thought I could still taste the peasant feet that had stomped the grapes, but it got better as it went, and the second flagon was a big improvement over the first.

I got some sleep. More, I imagine, than she did. First, though, the Giulia and I made a short reconnaissance run.
Not in a million years
, Al Dove had said, but I knew my man, and the location of the métro station helped turn a hunch into a shrewd conclusion. One, moreover, I like to think he wanted me to reach.

They'd run out of places to hide all right.

Then we drove slowly back to the Seine, and across, and up the Left-Bank quays with only the blinking yellow traffic lights for company. We went past the Institute and the Mint, ghostly shapes in the night, past the Invalides and the Eiffel, until these gave way in turn to the Front de Seine development and the Hilton and the rest of what passes for twentieth-century Paris.

The whole city seemed to float by in a gray and untroubled sleep. Millions of people sleeping in stacks, and horizontal rows. It was contagious. When we got to our destination, we made one slow pass up the block. The trees were blurred shadows in the sparse light, the façades were totally dark. We circled around and came back in, then tucked into a space some two cars in from the corner. Then I slumped down in my seat, gave the Giulia a soft chorus of “
Auprès de Ma Blonde
,” pulled my beret over my eyes, and the next sound we heard was the garbage truck making its rounds shortly after dawn.

FOURTEEN

My watch said 7:32. At 7:34 the Mercedes slid through my side mirror, followed by the Renault van. A little further on, the garbage truck blocked the street, and the natives in orange vests who were loading it up seemed in no particular hurry. At least, that is, until the driver of the Mercedes got out. From my vantage point I couldn't see what he did, but he must have been a pretty persuasive fellow. The spades jumped onto the side rear platforms like they'd been goosed, and the garbage truck trundled to the end of the block and disappeared around the corner.

The Mercedes eased into a slot about halfway down. The Renault van stayed double-parked. Four people got out of the Mercedes and entered Lascault's building. Two were male, one female, and the fourth an immense black specimen with a tattersall cap on his head who looked like he could have picked his teeth with Jonnie Davis.

Mrs. Al Dove and friends, and it looked to me like the Americans had landed again.

You'd have thought they might have worried about what people would say. About all that uncollected garbage on the sidewalk, for one thing. Or about their taking their gorilla inside without a leash. Or about picking a Sunday morning to do their moving. But none of these things seemed to cause them the slightest concern. A few minutes later the two white men emerged from the front door struggling with a large flat oblong object about as tall as them and half again as long. Call it a painting and you wouldn't be far off. The gorilla followed them out with another one of about the same size tucked under his arm. By this time the driver of the Renault van had the rear doors open. They slid the pictures inside, and the driver closed and locked the doors with a key.

Then Binty Dove came out of the building. She'd changed her clothes from the day before, except for the ivory-colored raincoat. She looked about ready for church. Otherwise, murder hadn't changed her a bit. She stood on the sidewalk with her back to me, conferring with her troops, while the sun made shadows on the façades and the budding trees emerged tall and straight.

Then the driver got into the Renault van and Binty, after a glance up and down the sidewalk in either direction, walked into the street and climbed in on the passenger's side. The three heavies watched from the sidewalk until the van had turned the corner, then turned themselves and single-filed into the building.

I hoped they'd at least brought a deck of cards, because it looked like they had a long wait in front of them. But I didn't stick around to find out.

At that I almost blew them coming out of Paris. A gorgeous day was in the making, the sky a shade of blue you only see in postcards and movies, with a scattering of low white puffball clouds for comic relief. The air was so soft as to turn the hardest heart to reveries of picnics and nymphs and carousing in the bushes. In short: a city dweller's dream and a traffic cop's nightmare. Within a couple of hours every road leading out of the city would be choked and the Boulevard Périphérique a solid circle of inching vehicles. Horns would be blowing, tempers flying, radiators boiling over. Already at eight you had premonitions of it, in the no-quarter tactics of the early birds rushing to get out while the getting was good.

To go to L'Isle-Adam, you quit the autoroute in St. Denis and follow the Nationale 1 out toward Montmorency. The Renault van left the autoroute all right, but when we got to where the Nl forks into the N16, he veered right out of the turn lane. I went after him, but out of the straight-ahead lanes and only by stepping on a solid white line and a couple of families of Sunday revelers who had the right of way. Or so they thought, and so did the white-gloved gendarme who was directing matters from the center of the intersection. He whistled me down. I stopped on the arc of the turn and watched through the rear-view while he descended on me in slow imperious strides. Behind him the traffic was already starting to snarl, and it was going to take him the rest of the morning to untangle it. But he didn't seem to care.

Before he got to me, I had my head out the window.

“Look, Officer,” I said in my best Yakima American, “I'm sorry as hell but I've got a plane to catch. Is this the right way to the airport?”

It's a dumb enough tactic, but I've never known it to fail. He touched his fingers to his kepi. I could see the hesitation writ large in his eyes.

“It may sound crazy,” I went on, “but my mother's just had twins! Can you imagine that?
Twins
? At her age? I just got the telegram this morning. You just can't keep the old girl down! But the thing is, I don't know whether I've got two new brothers or two new sisters or one of each, and the telegram didn't say. Can you imagine? So I've got to go home to find out, only home is in Yakima, that's in the state of Washington, and that means I've got to catch the wagon train out of Seattle which leaves every Monday morning at …”

Somewhere in there he asked me for my papers, but I gave him no mercy. I was making like an airplane. I had my head down out the window and my arms swept back inside the Giulia and behind him the horns were blowing like it was Bastille Day and New Year's Eve rolled into one.

“Airport!” I shouted at him in the din. “AIR! PORT!”

Dumb enough, like I say, but pretty near foolproof, and if you work on your French, you can probably get away with it on the San Diego Freeway.

Finally he shouted back,
“Fous-moi la paix!”
which, broadly translated, means “Fuck off!” He pointed down the N16 and white-gloved me on. I didn't give him time to change his mind.

The Renault van, though, was nowhere in sight. I was beginning to feel like one of J.-C. Fleurie's minions. I pulled into the first gas station I came to, unfolded my map, and then saw right away what had happened. Because if the quickest way to Chantilly was the autoroute, the shortest was this very same Nationale 16. In other words, L'Isle-Adam had been scratched, and unless Bernard Lascault had yet another hideaway in the northern suburbs, they were headed right for Cookie's.

I set the Giulia on the automatic pilot and stuck her in high. Some twenty kilometers up the road, in a place called Luzarches, I caught up with them. I had a crazy passing notion that if I'd wanted to, I could have taken them right there, on the highway, made off with the two Rillington-Blumenstocks, gone back to Paris and copped the real one, and set up shop for myself. B. F. Cage,
courtier en tableaux
. But it was only passing—the product, maybe, of too much Al Dove—and more to the point was the idea that the reception committee still waiting for me in Lascault's apartment might be only part of the overall muscle. Because unless I missed my guess, Bernard Lascault had flown home from L.A. on a group plan.

Instead, then, I gave the van plenty of room, and when they entered the little village and turned to squeeze down the alley, I kept on going to the next town. Because suddenly there was no hurry at all. None at all. I had time for a basket of croissants in the local café and a double
express
, and even a telephone chat with my friend Dedini.

Monsieur le Commissaire was in his usual foul mood, heightened by his having been up half the night. And on a wild goose chase, and one set off by yours truly. No, they hadn't found Al Dove in the métro. All they'd found was damaged government property. Dedini wanted Al Dove and Binty Dove and me, all at once. That was nothing new, but now he added Helen Raven and William Rillington to his list.

I told Dedini to sit tight. I was working on something, a plan, I'd call him later on. If he wanted to keep busy in the meantime, there were three stiffs over in Lascault's apartment who needed a fourth for bridge. Only he shouldn't knock before entering.

I hung up, paid for breakfast and the call, and went back outside to the Giulia. I started missing Dedini almost immediately. I also missed the Giulia, once I'd parked her again and gotten out. This was just outside the village, almost exactly at the place where I'd turned around on my first visit. I missed Pierrot the Nosepicker, too. At times like that a man needs all the friends he can get, but the only candidates I spotted when I skirted through the fields were a couple of peasants who looked like they belonged in somebody's landscape, and they paid me no attention once they saw I wasn't carrying an easel.

The wall was of stone and uniformly higher than my head. I chose a likely spot and pulled myself up. No siren went off, at least that I could hear, and a thick copse of poplars screened me from humanity. But suddenly, as I dropped down on the inside, I realized that I'd no plan at all.

FIFTEEN

The breakfast room was a cozy fishbowl affair, somewhat smaller than an exhibition hall, that bubbled out behind the mansion into some tulip beds. The Lascaults were receiving there that beautiful Sunday, Monsieur in white ducks and an elegant white turtleneck, Madame in a two-piece white ensemble of some light jersey material. The staff also wore white. In fact the only people who didn't were the guests. Of these there were three, two of them invited. The invited ones were a pair of art-loving Californians called Binty Dove and Johnny Vee, sometimes known as “the Alligator.” The uninvited one was also from the shores of the Pacific, but not much of an art lover.

They were already into the scrambled eggs and kippers when I arrived. I took another coffee, just to be sociable. The field hand who'd brought me there seemed to want to hang around to make sure I drank it, but the only white on him was in his eyeballs and when Johnny Vee told him to beat it, he beat it. We'd only just met. This was outside one of the outbuildings I'd spotted coming through the trees and which was where, to judge from the Renault van parked next to it, the master and mistress kept the overflow of their collection. A considerable sweep of lawn separated it from the main house, and I was standing in its shadow, deciding my next move, when he made up my mind for me. “Lift 'em, ofay,” he said behind me. I lifted my arms and the rest of my body lifted with them, helped out by the forearm under my chin. He shook me down, and then he kept a respectful few paces in back of me while we crossed the sward.

The sun had turned the windows of the house into one-way mirrors. This gave them plenty of time to get their signals straight. Still there was one of those awkward silences when I came in, understandable enough, though, when you remember that around about then I was supposed to be all stretched out in Bernard Lascault's apartment with my arms folded across my chest and a rose between my teeth.

Finally my hostess invited me to sit down. Johnny Vee seconded the motion.

“Siddown, Cage,” he said.

Freddy Schwartz had mentioned him. I only knew him slightly, and I'd never had any wish to deepen the relationship. I knew that his real name was more complicated than Johnny Vee, also that he'd picked up his nickname on the L.A. high-school basketball courts. Later on he'd played college ball in California and he'd been good too. Some claimed he'd thrown away a career in the pros Maybe so, but still in his early thirties, he was already called the heir apparent, and his daddy, they said, owned a whole pro league among his so-called legitimate enterprises.

In Chantilly, France, though, the Alligator was a long way from home. I think he felt it too, and reacted by trying to throw his weight around.

I didn't sit down right away, though that had less to do with him than with what I saw over their heads. They weren't hung, only propped up on chairs. Two chairs to each, and they took up most of the wall space in the room that wasn't glass. There were people in these paintings too, but they weren't portraits, more like studies of architecture and space, formal and weird at the same time, with balconies and archways and windows opening onto scenes that seemed to belong to some totally other time and place. I don't know what you'd call them, and whether they were worth all the fuss is another question, but like the portrait they too seemed painted within an inch of their lives, and to my unpracticed eye they sure looked like they came from the same brush.

“What do you think of them, Mr. Cage?” asked my hostess.

I sat down then, between her and Johnny Vee, with Binty and Bernard Lascault across from me.

“More to the point,” I said, “is what
you
think of them, Mrs. Lascault. Do they measure up to your expectations?”