The Stiff Upper Lip (14 page)

“It's a wonder,” I said, “that they've got anybody left to look for us.”

“Who?”

“The Paris Law. Do you know any of the victims?”

“No.”

“Never heard of any of them?”

She hadn't. Neither had I. Probably they weren't Delatour's. On the other hand, it could have been Delatour's who'd done the shooting.

There was the weather too. It was raining everywhere in France, the announcer said, except on the Côte d'Azur. A low-pressure zone had extended over the continent from the Atlantic, and the rain was expected to continue all day, with average temperatures dropping below the seasonal norms.

I switched the radio off. We sat there, listening to the rain plip-plipping on the Beetle's roof. Every so often a car went by, spraying us with water. Nobody paid us any mind.

“Cards on the table,” Valérie said. “I've told you everything, Cage. There's nothing left out.”

“O.K.,” I said, my hand on the door handle. “I'm going to drive now. We'd better get going.”

“There's just one thing,” she said, reaching toward me.

She was smiling, around the eyes as well as the mouth. Her tongue licked across her upper lip.

It was like her, I realized, to up the ante when you least expected it.

“I want to fuck you,” she said.

“Now? Here?”

“Now. Here.”

An improbable proposition. I mean: a rain-swept road in the middle of nowhere, a rented Beetle with a stick shift on the floor, and she having just made a confession which, as far as I could tell, had cost her.

I grinned at her.

“That's a beautiful idea too,” I said. “And I wont let you forget it either. Right now, though, I think we'd better go talk to Brother Roscoe.”

11

We went out of France at the corner of the Belgian border where the little duchy of Luxembourg tucks into the picture. This was a tip from Bobby H., in case anyone was looking for us, and, what with the weather, it turned out to be a good one. The last representative of the French Republic didn't so much as come out of his booth to say hello. He just looked up and motioned us through.

We picked up the autoroute again near Liège and rolled across Belgium without stopping. Which was just as well. From what I've seen of it, the land of the Walloons and the Flemings is a bastard place, half French and half Dutch, with the best of each left out. But Holland is something else, and if Holland is something else, then Amsterdam, friend, is one of the last of the great towns. The travel hucksters like to call it the Venice of the North, but according to Cage's Pleasure Guide to the Old Continent, the Venetians would have to work a hundred years to make their town as civilized as the inner city of the burghers.

As it happened, though, we didn't get near enough to Amsterdam that day to wave. We were headed for a pocket-sized Dutch fairyland to the south of it, off the road to The Hague and the North Sea resort of Scheveningen. I call it a fairyland simply because it's hard to believe people still live in places like that. I mean private citizens like you and me. I know some of the French châteaux are still inhabited, and Nico van den Luyken's domain could have fit into a corner, say, of Vaux-le-Vicomte. But the French châteaux-dwellers—the two-legged ones, that is—are, for the most part, doddering aristocrats who live in one room because that's all they can afford to heat, whereas Nico van den Luyken's domain included a functioning windmill, expanses of orchard, a model dairy farm, and a stone-and-brick manse that, even in the rain, put the third little pig to shame.

To top it all off. he ran the joint at a profit.

I've said that Valérie had had to reopen a drawer of her life on Roscoe's account. The drawer, apparently, contained Nicholas van den Luyken. The image is wrong, though. Nico van den Luyken would have taken up the whole cupboard. He was a tall, ruddy, and efficient-looking Dutchman with a shock of auburn hair speckled with gray and beard to match, plus a grip you weren't about to forget. He spoke impeccable English. He had the self-assured manner of his class and surroundings that made you feel like you'd somehow missed the boat. He was discreet about it, though, to the point that once he'd seen to it that we had a bath, fresh clothes, and a drink, he left us alone with Roscoe, saying only that dinner would be served whenever we wanted it.

When I came downstairs, I found Roscoe alone in Nico's living room. He didn't fit the image either, at least not the one I'd formed mentally. He was sprawled in a low couch, a tumbler of orange juice beside him, with his legs stretched out toward a crackling fire, and reading the European edition of
Newsweek
under an arching stainless-steel lamp. The threads he had on were Nico's, and they fit him amazingly well: pressed flannel trousers, a thick natural-wool turtleneck, and a hound's-tooth tweed jacket that had a Bond Street look. The only anachronism was his footgear: Adidas sneakers, white with blue stripes. The sartorial resources of the estate, I guessed, didn't go as far as Roscoe's shoe size. But. beholding him, a Martian touring the Earth for the first time could only have said: “What's that you were telling me about the oppressed black peoples?”

“Hey there,” said Roscoe when I came in. He gave me a wave. “Come on in out of the rain, stranger, dry your feets and tell us the news from down home.”

“The news from down home,” I said, “is that they've started shooting at each other in the streets.”

“In
Paris
? I'd've … But hey, man! You look like you been catching some of that shit yourself!”

“So I did.” I said. “But that was before they started with live ammunition.”

He whistled. puffing his cheeks.

“Sounds to me like a good place to stay away from,” he said. Then he drooped the magazine and, reaching out both arms behind him, stretched like an elongated cat. He yawned deeply. “Must be getting
warm
in here. The fire makes me sleepy. Seems like all I done here is
sleep
. man. Shoot, if I wasn't such a lazy nigger, I'd get up and have off this coat.” He chuckled. “Well, come on, man. Aren't you going to tell me who's after my ass today?”

“Not so many people as you'd think.”

“No? Well, that's depressing news. I guess I must be losin' my touch.”

I started to tell him about the Law and Delatour, but then van den Luyken and Valérie came in. Our host busied himself at the bar. He didn't have Glenfiddich, he told me, but if I fancied the pure malts, wouldn't I sample his own brand? I would, and did, and we drank a toast of appreciation to the Highland distillers. Then he asked if there was anything else we needed. I wanted to see the day's papers from Paris. He replied, a little ruefully, that it was too late for him to do anything about it then, but that we'd have them at breakfast. At which, glass in hand, he left us alone.

“Did you tell him yet?” Valérie asked me.

“Tell me what yet?” said Roscoe.

“We were just getting there,” I answered. “But first off, Roscoe, let me ask you something. Your old friends in California, you know—Mr. Vee and his fellow sportsmen?—how was it you first found out they were onto you again?”

“First found out?” He laughed at that, then, when I didn't join him, stared at me big-eyed. “Man, they
always
been after my ass! I been
shot
at! When I was down in Mexico, some blood pulled a gun on me, tried to shoot my fucking head off. The bullet went right past my
ear
! You ever hear a bullet go right past your
ear
?”

He made a flat, whistling sound.

“I'm not talking about Mexico,” I said. “I'm talking about Paris.”

“Paris, yeah. Mexico, Paris, what difference does it make? You name the place, man, I
been
there.”

“But there was a long time in between, wasn't there? Between Mexico and Paris?”

“That's right. Three, four years.”

“During which things cooled down?”

“I don' know about that. There's things that never cool down.”

“But enough for you to start playing ball again?”

“I took the chance, man.”

“O.K. Now, who was it who told you in Paris that they were onto you again?”

“Like nobody had to
tell
me, man. That was something
knowed
.”

There was something in his speech I'd noticed before: when he felt the soueeze coming on, his talk went nigger, complete with leaning on the verbs.

“But somebody did tell you, didn't he? Didn't Odessa tell you?”

“Odessa
knew
'bout it, sure. But so did the other bloods. You don' under
stan
', man. We got the grapevine. Things like that get around.”

“Sure they do. But they get around because somebody starts them. Didn't Odessa start this one?”

“You don' understan', man. Nobody
started
it. It …”

“That's not what you said,” Valérie cut in impatiently. “You said it was Odessa who told you about it. You said if it ever got out that he'd told you, his own head would be on the block. You even said that was what friends were all about.”

“Did I say that?” His eyes were big again, with white and innocence.

“You certainly did.”

“Well, maybe I did. But so what? Odessa only got it from some place else.”

“No,” I said, “that's where you're wrong. He didn't get it from some place else. He's where it started.”

“Now what in hell would …?”

His voice trailed off.

“He lied,” Valérie said. “Nobody was out to get you, at least nobody from California. Cage has verified it. Without wanting to, he even got Dédé to verify it.”

Roscoe looked at me.

“That's the way it checks out,” I said. “As far as Johnny Vee's concerned, you're ancient history. I'm not saying that if you went home, you'd get met at the airport with a brass band, but as long as you stay over here, they're not going to hassle you.”

I guess you don't run scared for years and then shake the hand of the man who tells you there's nothing to be afraid of. The more so if you're black and the man who's bringing you the news is white. In other words, I didn't expect gratitude from him.

He didn't disappoint me either.

“Why
would
Odessa have done that?” said Valérie.

“I don't know that he did,” Roscoe answered sharply. “It's Cage's word against his.”

“He played you for a fool,” she went on. “You know it too. He was dealing in drugs, and he wasn't the only one. They wanted you to join in. You told me about that too, remember? How they were after you all the time but you didn't want to get messed up in it?”

“That's the truth. I sure didn't want to get messed up with dope.”

“Then why did you?” I asked.

“I …”

“Wait a minute,” Valérie interrupted. “It was Dédé's business too, remember? But you said you didn't owe him anything. He hadn't brought you into the league, he hadn't signed you up. Isn't that right?”

“That's right. I didn't owe Delatour nothin'.”

“Whereas you did Odessa?”

“Odessa was my friend, sure, but …”

“We know who killed him, Roscoe,” she said. “It was one of Delatour's hoodlums. We know why too. They'd have killed you too, for the same reason, if they hadn't thought that was Cage's job.”

“
Cage's
job? Now, what the hell you
talkin
' about?”

She laid it on him, how she'd told Delatour I was the hired gun from California, and why. He whistled again, blowing hard through his cheeks.

“Honey,” he said, “you were takin' some hell of a
chance
.”

“That's not the point,” she said flatly. “The point is that you and Odessa were dealing together.”

“Now, hold it there!
Hold
it! I …”

“Delatour's not the only one who knows,” I said. “The Law does too.”

“
What
Law?”

It was my turn to explain, about Bobet and the conversation we'd had, and the file the narks already had going on him. I watched him squirm with it. He squirmed all right, all six-feet-seven of him, and grabbed his hair, and blew wind through his cheeks, and he said that, between me and Val and Delatour and the Law, it was the same old story, the white folks ganging up on the niggers again. But in the end, that phony air of injury and disbelief went out of him like the wind from a balloon and there was no place left for him to squirm to.

So we got it out of him.

It was like I'd figured, more or less. Odessa had had to lean on him hard, but Odessa had been good at that. Roscoe's ass was in a sling, Odessa had said, and since he, Odessa, was doing everything he could to help him, all he wanted was a favor in return. According to Roscoe, he'd only done Odessa a couple of such favors, though later on the “couple” became “several.” All he'd done, in any case, was carry stuff back and forth between Paris and Amsterdam. He hadn't even known what he was carrying. Well, like he'd
known
, but he hadn't ever
looked
. What Odessa did was stuff his bag at the Paris end, and when they got home, Odessa took it from him and gave it back to him empty. The same thing in Amsterdam. Odessa's contact in Amsterdam was this blood called Wallace Edner. Odessa gave the money, or whatever it was, to Wallace, and Wallace came back with the stuff. And that was all there was to it.

“This Wallace Edner?” I said to Valérie. “Wasn't he the one you were trying to find the other night?”

“Yes.”

“Why'd you go looking for him?”

She looked at Roscoe, and Roscoe said: “Wallace is a good blood. I figured he could put us up at least.”

“But he didn't?”