The French Kiss (2 page)

It was vintage Al Dove, all of it, with the French thrown in.

There was a woman standing behind him. I'd never seen her before, though I'd been told to look out for her. I heard him introduce her later as “America's foremost art critic,” but from her get-up you'd have thought even the art world had its poverty corner. She was dumpy and medium height, but her shape and clothes made her look shorter. Her hair was black and chopped, her skin bad, her expression sullen, and the suit she wore was too big in the jacket, too long in the skirt. We shook hands, but Helen Raven's heart wasn't in it; neither, I guess, was mine, and whatever words we exchanged are distinctly unmemorable.

Because then it was a case of Cagey-meet-Paris, or Paris-meet-Cagey. It was hail-hail-the-gang's-all-here, with one arm around Helen Raven and the other around yours truly, and we were all “ole buddies” or “
très chers amis
,” including ironically my most recent client to whom I was introduced along the way, and if Al Dove really wondered what his ole buddy Cage was doing in Paris or why he'd showed up this particular night, he made up his own answers and drew his own conclusions. Because he was too busy, as it were, taking his ole buddy Cage up the mountain and showing him the view, or that part of the view that was visible and meant to be seen: the success and glory of Al Dove Enterprises, Art Division, and if the guided tour came out half in French and half in English this time, it made no difference. Because I'd been there before, and often enough to have known without briefing that the art operation would have another seamier face, way down below where the deals were made and money went from hand to hand.

Like I've said, the name of the game this particular night was Blumenstock. It was in the air, Blumenstock, and the
tout-Paree
was already plugged in. A few years back, the painter in question had tried to dive off a bridge somewhere in New England, and maybe he'd've made it if he hadn't been behind the wheel of a car at the time. He'd been fried to the eyeballs, a condition presumably of several years' duration, and the scandal sheets had gone to town on dope, booze, and the tragedy of Great American Artists generally. There'd been something more, some kind of court battle, and then he'd been sent on to painters' heaven. But what I didn't know till later was that …

Well, but there were a lot of things I didn't know till later.

It was hanging behind floor-to-ceiling velvet draperies on a huge wall in the central salon. Several lengths of velvet rope cordoned it off from the mob. As we worked our way toward it, the rock group stopped playing and the lights dimmed. A cluster of spots went on in the ceiling overhead, and a minute later the din had ebbed so that you could hear the clink of glass in the background.

“Now you're going to see something, Cagey,” Al Dove whispered to me.

He stepped over the velvet rope and onto a small platform. The spots framed the upper part of his body. He surveyed the
tout-Paree
and I could feel them pushing forward at my back.

“Mesdames, Mesdemoiselles, Messieurs”
he began,
“mes très chers amis …”

He went into a short speech, punctuated by an occasional exploding flashbulb and delivered in a glib and smoothly accented French. John Blumenstock, he said, had been a great American painter. His work, universally acknowledged, was on display in museums and collections around the world. But what were largely unknown, and seldom seen, were the great canvases of his last years. It was an honor, said Al Dove, for him to have been able to acquire several of them, and a privilege, said Al Dove, to show one of them for the first time to the public, here in Paris, among his
très chers amis
. But what was he, asked Al Dove, but a humble dealer in works of art? Therefore he had invited the distinguished art critic, Professor Helen Raven, to come to Paris and join him in presenting this remarkable late work. For if many people knew Helen Raven as a critic and mentor, and others as having been a close friend of the artist, few realized the depth of her personal sacrifice in behalf of this great art.

“
Je vous présente ainsi
…” said Al Dove. There was a smattering of applause, and Helen Raven stood next to him under the spots.

An unlikely couple, I thought, while one of the Susan Smiths handed them up the drawstrings to the drapery. I felt the push again behind me, the heat of bodies in semidarkness, followed by a great communal “Ahhhhh” like a sigh, and louder applause, and exclamations of “
Bravo
!” and “
Magnifique
!” when the velvet curtains slid aside.

A man and a woman were sitting side by side on a couch in a living room. An enormous hound was stretched out on the carpet at their feet. The couch too was larger-than-life, a big overstuffed job in a garish luminous purple, and either it or some other trick of perspective diminished the couple. Their feet were hidden by the dog, but you got the impression they didn't reach the floor. The man had a ravaged face that was twisted into a half-smile or a half-grimace, you couldn't tell which. Somehow I got the idea he was John Blumenstock. He wore a maroon smoking jacket, and the woman, a lime-colored dressing gown with ruffles on the shoulders and a turban around her head. She was sitting straight up, which made her taller than the man, and staring straight out in a kind of stiff-necked, somebody-just-goosed-me expression.

They weren't very nice-looking people, whoever they were. They also looked, and everything around them, like they'd been painted within an inch of their lives.

Then a lot of things happened at once. All of a sudden there was renewed pressure at my back, like somebody had fainted or dropped a stinkbomb in the middle of the crowd. I heard shouts behind me, indignant. First one, then echoes of it all around. Catcalls and whistles, like what the bull gets when he refuses to charge. And though it took me a minute to understand and translate the message, then it came through, loud and raucous:

“C't'un faux! Scandale! C't'un faux!”

Faux
, friend, is French for
fake
.

Helen Raven got the message too. I was watching her scarred sullen mask under the spotlights. I saw it frown, then stiffen in anger. Then a UFO whizzed over my head to crash in a tinkling of glass, followed by another larger one that exploded against the wall above the picture in a shower of bubbly. Then Helen Raven ducked and I heard, or saw, Al Dove shouting something—maybe
Wait a minute! Wait a minute!
—but who could hear him? Because Keerist, I thought, the fucking French! I mean: who else could get exercised enough to start a riot over a painting? Where else in the world could you get the natives away from their television sets long enough to fill a hall over a six-by-eight piece of canvas much less go to war over it? Because that's what it was. It was 1789 and 1870 all over again, and it erupted faster than you could shout “Storm the Bastille!” One minute they were all puckered and docile in their
tout-Paree
finery, the next a surging shrieking mob. I mean people were actually throwing things, like bottles and punches, and you can say all you want about what happens when you pack too many mortals into too small a space and booze them up and turn down the lights, and theorize till you're blue in the face about the madness of crowds. Me, I still say: the fucking French.

But of course they had help. It had to have been. Maybe one man with lungs enough could have pulled it off, like a single spark combusting a forest fire, but chances were he had a half-dozen or more accomplices scattered in key places, with goblets in their hands and flagons in easy reach and no particular compunction about who they slugged or what with. Half a dozen maybe, and then, with the crush and the semidarkness, the
tout-Paree
did the rest. Undoubtedly they thought it was a gag at first, an Al Dove happening, something they could put down in their novels and memoirs, but once the blood started to flow the joke stuck in their throats and screams came out instead. People ran, scattered, converged, fled. People had their clothes ripped off. People fell and got stomped on. In a matter of minutes it was a brawler's paradise, every man for himself, women and children last, and it didn't simmer down till the whistles started to blow.

As it happened, I was one of the first to go. A sudden surge of bodies hit me from behind and the velvet ropes tackled me neatly around the ankles. I went down like a red-dogged quarterback and got up in a tangle, my hands trying to blot out the spotlights, in time to see a massive black fist thundering out of the ceiling like the hammer of Thor. Surprise, surprise, it was headed my way, but by the time I registered this unusual fact, all I could do was jerk my head back and take it on the shoulder. The jolt sent a shock of pain clear through to my big toes, and down I went again. This time I crawled around for a while on my hands and knees, cursing the referee, to surface in a gaggle of squawling pansies who were holding their nuts against all comers. A pair of arms was trying to grab me from behind. I ducked and pivoted and came up with my forearms extended, just like they teach you in Karate 3B, only to find myself wrestling with … my host.

“For Christ's sake!” Al Dove yelled at me.

He was quite a sight. Blood leaked from a corner of his mouth, and one sleeve of the silk jacket had been yanked half out of its socket. He was panting and heaving, and he had the desperate expression I'd seen before, of a high roller who won't admit the dice have gone cold.

“It's quite a shindig Al,” I must have said, or some such.

“The bastards,” he gasped at me. “I'll get them for this if it's the last thing I do!”

“Who's
them
?” I shouted.

“Listen Cagey!” A finger jabbed wildly at me. “It's gonna cost them triple now!
You
tell them that for me!
Triple!
”

“Who's
them
?” I shouted again, but there was no hearing his answer, if he had one. A new tide of bodies swept into us and crashed us apart. Somewhere in there the whistles started blowing and the lights went on again, but I wouldn't be too sure of the order of anything, only that when I glimpsed the
courtier en tableaux
again he was a salon away and heading out to sea. By this time I myself had been jammed backwards into one of the buffet tables. There was nowhere to go but up, so I watched the rest of the carnage, short-lived as it was, with one foot in a platter of sandwiches and the other in the caviar.

Short-lived, I should add, because of the arrival of the Law. I'll leave that part for you to put together. I mean, you've got a populace that on the one hand hires a police force big enough to colonize Mars and on the other shouts “Fascist pig!” every time they see a cop. I guess each of us has a little guilt tucked away in his soul, next to the stolen goods, but to see the
tout-Paree
cut and run that night when the Law showed up, you'd have thought the half of them had paintings stuck under their coats and the other half dope sewed in their linings. Well, but they don't do these things by halves in France. There must have been a couple of regiments of them, all in plainclothes and raincoats, including the ones who lined the staircase to make sure nobody ducked into the head. They didn't stop for any of the niceties either, like the customary identity checks. It was a case of “
Allez
!” and “
Dehors
!”, indiscriminately, which means
vamoose, beat it
, and as quickly as it had flared up, as quickly the party was over. Except for the stretcher cases.

Of these last there were relatively few—not so surprising at that in a country where hostilities are mostly of the keep-me-away-from-him-I'll-kill-him variety. The joint was a shambles, but the Art itself looked largely unscathed. My client was long gone. So, it appeared, were Al Dove and the Susan Smiths. In fact the only familiar body I spotted was crouched in front of the Blumenstock, her fangs bared and her claws flying.

A gendarme below me said:
“Allez!”

“Dehors!”
said another to my right, and a third threw in a
“C'est fini!”
for good measure.

Apparently they were talking to me. I've never been particularly partial to the breed, but the odds for argument were all wrong, and if I needed any further persuasion, it was the unceremonious image of Professor Helen Raven being separated from the Blumenstock across the way. At that I like to think the dame on the purple couch snuck a peek just that once—it would have pleased her no end—but as it was she continued to stare out, haughty and stiff-necked under the turban. Straight out in fact at me. So I jumped down.

TWO

I caught up with her under the porte-cochère. The rain had settled into one of those steady silent mists that haloes the lights and soaks the pavement, and she was rubbernecking the street from the shelter of the arch, like Prince Charming was late with the chariot.

“Well, Professor,” I said, coming up behind her, “you came a long way for a party, a shame it had to end so soon. But the night's young and Paris is all ours. And my humble droshky's right up the street.”

I even gave her the bow that went with it.

Startled, she jerked her head at me. But then she registered who I was, and the anxious glance gave way to the same sullen expression I'd seen before. Without a word, she turned and headed up the sidewalk in the rain.

I kept pace with her. When we came level with the Giulia I stopped her.

“Here she is, Professor, four wheels and a motor.” Then, taking her by the arm: “Look, there's no point your getting soaked on a night like this. I'll drop you wherever you're going.”

But some people are touchy, you could say. She whirled like I was a purse snatcher, and flailed, and slashed my arm away. Her eyes went big and nasty and froglike, and she brandished her fist in case I tried again.