The French Kiss (22 page)

But I'd be the last to be able to tell you you were wrong.

I saw the Professor set fire to the fistful of money. I heard Binty scream. I saw smoke at the base of the easels where the pile of litter and rags was heaviest, purposefully so, and I saw the pile catch in a flaring ring of innocent flames. But there was a gap of time—as short as a split second, as long as your life—when I did nothing. Then the roar went off, inside me as well as outside, a hellish stinking burst of sound, and the adrenalin spurted through my pores, and I lunged out of pure reflex for what was most precious to me.

I didn't get there—a lucky thing too because it would have scorched the skin from my hand. It wasn't the painting, or Binty, or the Professor. Not even the satchel of money. It was the goddamned gun.

But I collided with Helen Raven. We'd charged at cross purposes, but our fantasies flung us forward together, headfirst into the pyre she'd created. One of the easels crashed and the flames soared up at us and past, hot and stinking and delicious. We saw red; we sensed red; all of us, our skin, our bodies, our minds, caught fire in a tremendous enveloping flush of red in all its hues that crushed all sound, heat, smell. Then we staggered out of it, struggling and hurting, and I heard her shriek, a maniacal blend, and my own roar tore out of my burning throat.

I fought with her and lost. She was all strength, a berserk strength magnified a thousandfold by her madness. She tore out of my grasp. She charged the flames again. By this time they'd gone yellow, a solid searing living wall that reached out and devoured her. I grabbed for her, found hair, neck, and with a terrific wrench flung her backward. She landed on the floor behind me. Her hair and the wool of her jacket were alive with flames. I remember searching frantically for something to beat them with, and my mind must have been shouting: Where are you, Dedini, now that I need you! But the coughing sobs I heard were my own, and all I found finally for Helen Raven was my own smothering body.

They found us there, on the burning floor. I remember that too, vaguely, the sound of their feet on the stairs, like my proverbial horses galloping across the roof of my soul. At some point there was a terrific crack, like the heavens had had enough, but all it was was the skylight exploding outward into the street. By the time the Law arrived, there was nothing much for them to do but drag us out, and when the fire department showed up later in their pointy helmets … well, there's always something weirdly attractive about the spectacle of a building with flames shooting out of its head.

I've said I reacted out of reflex, and so had Helen Raven. She'd gone after the fire, Hindu-style, while I, embarrassing as it may be, had gone for the gun.

But so had Binty Dove gone … out of pure reflex.

She might have made it too. There must have been confusion on the stairs, and more of it by the time she hit the street. And if Dedini had her on his wanted list, I doubt he'd had time to hand out her description to every one of his spear carriers.

But when she reached the Quai de Jemmapes, where police vehicles blocked off the cobbled street, with the canal just beyond and the trundle bridges arching across to what would have been freedom, one of the fishermen broke loose from the group on the banks. He was a hell of a fisherman too, with one arm in a sling, and the rod he carried in his good hand had nothing to do with the art of angling. And he shot her dead in the face with it, even as she was running toward him.

EIGHTEEN

It was a bloody conclusion, it came in a hurry, and I guess it calls for a tip of the hat of sorts to the Paris Law that they managed to mop up the mess as quickly as they did. In this, though, they had help too. From those high and largely anonymous places, for one, but also from the circumstances themselves. Looked at from this point of view, I only came in at the tail end. Because there's an old French proverb to the effect that if you let things go to wrack and ruin long enough, they'll eventually take care of themselves.

The story the press got, and gave in turn to the jaded masses, was of a modern love triangle. For “modern” read homosexual. According to it, Binty and Helen Raven had been secret lovers, and so intense was their passion that the one had tried to kill the other's husband, and the other had shot and killed her husband's private investigator. The studio—the “clandestine aerie,” as it was called—was their love tryst, and it was there that they'd hidden the stolen Blumenstock masterpiece. How the fire had started no one knew. Some said a lover's quarrel, others an accident. But their passion had gone up in flames along with a great work of art, and it was there, on the smoke-scarred quay, that the husband, maddened by jealousy, had taken his revenge. Such minor discrepancies like what the Law was doing there ahead of time, or why they'd stolen the great work of art, or why said great work of art had once been called a fake, got buried in the lurid details, and when you put together sex, fire, murder, art, plus the fact that the three principals were Americans … well, you can imagine what it did for circulation.

Farfetched? Sure it was farfetched. We live, friend, in a farfetched era.

More to the point: would it hold together?

At first glance you wouldn't think so. After all, there were too many people involved; besides, weren't we always taught in Sunday school that the truth will out? But once you start going down the list of those who really knew enough to make waves …

Take a closer look, in alphabetical order:

ALAN DOVE. He was the one with the most to lose, and the least. If they'd wanted to, the Law could have laid three murders in his lap, plus fraud, plus receipt and sale of stolen property, plus unpaid bills, bad checks, plus anything else they happened to have lying around. In other words, he was in a pretty mediocre bargaining position. Actually, I doubt he even tried for once, and this because, to the French mentality, the
crime passionnel
is the most understandable and therefore condonable of crimes, the more so when the criminal is an enraged husband. He might do time—justice must after all be served—but he'd do it far from the rock pile and further from the guillotine.

BINTY DOVE. The dead, like they say, tell no stories.

J.-C. FLEURIE. Limited knowledge. Things down at Exceptional Detective may have been on the turbulent side for a while, what with nosy reporters, but there are times when one has no choice but to cooperate with the authorities.

BERNARD LASCAULT. Everything to gain by the story as published. Business as usual at Arts Mondiaux, and his American connection intact. How his new partnership might work out, only time would tell, but we all have to learn the hard way.

COOKIE LASCAULT. The loss of the Blumenstock compensated for by the two Rillington-Blumenstocks. Of course her 160,000 francs had gone up in smoke too, but presumably she could afford it. At least if she put in an insurance claim, nobody's ever asked me for my testimony.

HELEN RAVEN. A potential threat, even a serious one. But it would be a long time before the Professor could talk to anybody about anything, and then probably only her psychiatrist could make sense of it. Said psychiatrist, to be sure, would operate a sanatorium a long way from Paris, and the bills would be paid, as long as necessary, by an unknown benefactor.

WILLIAM RILLINGTON. Picked up by the Law, then disappeared. Conceivably the grant-in-aid he had been receiving from Al Dove has been taken up by another source, and it wouldn't be surprising to see such a promising star emerge in the art constellations of the future.

SUSAN SMITH. Limited knowledge. Subsequently disappeared, as did all Alan Dove's former employees.

JOHNNY VEE. Left the country, along with those of his friends who had been picked up by the Law. Presumed alive and well in California. No reason, for the moment, to meddle further with his French investment.

There are, of course, at least three significant omissions from this list. Messieurs les Commissaires, to mention two. But the Service de la Répression des Fraudes Artistiques could now finally close the dossier on Alan Dove,
courtier en tableaux
, and go on to more important matters, like all those people copying the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Whereas the Police Judiciaire …? Well, they had their case all right, open and shut, complete with accused and murder weapon, and besides, do you think you could spend twenty-eight years in the service and not know who's going to sign your pension checks?

Which leaves just one.

They took me and Helen Raven away in an ambulance. She was in shock and she'd been burned badly, and the skin-graft boys at the hospital were going to have a hell of a time figuring out how to make some semblance of a human being out of her. Me, I'd just been burned. It was mostly my hands and arms, and superficially, and the treatment I got wasn't much more elaborate than what I could have done myself with a lump of cow's butter. Still, they kept me there some thirty-six hours, and either the no-visitors sign was up or my friends and relatives, wherever they are, had given up the ghost. Finally, after they'd taken my temperature early Tuesday morning, I got out of bed, managed to put my clothes on, and simply walked out of the joint, and nobody so much as checked me to see if I was making off with the Demerol.

It was passing weird, to be standing on a Paris street in the morning, alone and anonymous, with nobody to chase me and nobody to chase. The weather had changed too. It was unseasonably cold, a weak drizzle was falling, and from the gray look of the sky, it would get thicker before it got thinner.

I had a passing notion to head for the apartment in Montparnasse. The wind was blowing, though it was the wrong wind, and so were the trees wrong, but together they made Montparnasse seem a long way off. I found a cab in the taxi rank outside the hospital and rode to the hotel instead.

The Giulia was parked in the street, with two tickets stuck under the windshield wipers. I paid the taxi and went inside. The desk clerk handed me my key and a stack of messages, but he paid me no more mind than if I'd just gone out to buy a newspaper.

I went upstairs to my suite.

Most of the messages were from Freddy Schwartz, and no sooner had I opened the door than the phone started to ring. It was a collect call, from California, would I accept the charges? Yes I would, and gladly. I must have needed the sound of a familiar voice.

Freddy Schwartz was full of booze and disclosure. He was also very pissed off. He'd been trying to get me for three days. Where the fuck had I been for three days?

“I've been around, Fred,” I said, but my own voice sounded peculiar to me.

“
Around
? Well for Christ's sake …!”

“Never mind,” I said. “Give me what you've got.”

He did too, and listening, I could almost believe that what had happened had been a bad dream, and that the bandages on my hands were part of it, and that when I hung up I could go back into the bedroom and talk some more about what the B. F. stood for. Well, almost. Because what he had was the following: 1) that Binty Dove had indeed gotten to Paris before Al Dove's soirée; 2) that Bernard Lascault had been in L.A. the week before and had only gone back Saturday; 3) that when he'd gone back, he'd taken some company along, including Johnny Vee; 4) …

Well, I forget what 4) was.

“Hell, Cagey,” said Freddy Schwartz, “you remember Johnny Vee, don't you?”

“Yes, I remember Johnny Vee.”

“Well …? Christ Almighty, you're really onto something all right! You've got them by the short hairs, Cagey! Right by the balls!”

“I know, Freddy. Right by the balls.”

“Well …?”

“Nothing. I'm just trying to figure out what to do next.”

“
What to do
? Well for Christ's sake, Johnny Vee, that's the big time, Cagey, that's dangerous company!”

“I know, Fred. Only …”

“Only what?”

But I wasn't up to telling him. Instead I thanked him for his good work. He sounded somehow disappointed. He told me to be good, and careful if I couldn't be good. I said I'd be good and careful. He told me to let him know how it came out. I said I would. He asked me, plaintively kind of, if when it was all over I wouldn't be coming home for a while? I said I didn't know, but that if I did we'd split a bottle of Four Roses together.

“V.O.,” he said, chuckling hoarsely.

“V.O.,” I agreed.

I hung up and stared down at my hands. I had it in mind to strip the bandages off. But just then the phone rang again.

It was the desk clerk.

“There are two gentlemen to see you, Monsieur.”

“Tell them to wait five minutes, then send them up.”

“I'm sorry, Monsieur. They're already in the elevator.”

A minute later they came charging in, huffing and puffing and pissed as hell that I'd checked out of the hospital without telling them.

In spite of its name, the Charles de Gaulle Airport at Roissy is the French answer to
2001
. Maybe Notre Dame's only twenty kilometers away like they say, but you still get the feeling that everything's been flown in from somewhere else, not only the people, and that the voices announcing the flights are really tapes of human beings made a thousand years ago. What with my Air France connection, I'd come to know my way around pretty well, but when I went looking for the men's room on one of those rolling rugs, I still never knew for sure that I wasn't going to end up on the shuttle run to Mars till I heard the flush.

In any case, that was where I ended up that dismal Tuesday, against my will, in a small low-ceilinged office sandwiched on an intermediate level between Arrivals and Departures and belonging to something called the Frontier Air Police. My two escorts had brought me there. They didn't know anything about Dedini or his bargain. Neither did the Frontier Air Police. All the escorts knew was that they were to deliver me to the Frontier Air Police with baggage and passport, and all the Frontier Air Police knew was that I was ticketed for Air France's one o'clock flight, destination New York. Only there was some kind of complication, nobody knew what. And so they left me there, with an armed guard on the other side of the door, and I did my slow-burn routine, and stripped the bandages off my hands.