The Stiff Upper Lip (19 page)

So Valérie set about rattling him.

“What do you think, Cage?” she started in from the front seat. “Where do you think we're going?” Then, when I didn't answer right off: “Why do you think Johnny Boy doesn't want to tell us? It's pretty obvious to me, isn't it to you?”

“I think we're going to Dédé's,” I said, joining in. “The scenic southern route.”

“That's what I think too. I think all six of us are going to pay Dédé a visit. And Johnny Boy's going to try to trade us in exchange for a cease-fire. Isn't that the idea, Johnny Boy?”

Johnny Vee said nothing.

“You sold out on Dédé, didn't you, Johnny?” she went on. “What's the matter, cat got your tongue?”

“Shut up,” he said. “Shut your cunt's mouth.”

“If you ask me, Cage,” Valérie said, “they're scared to death of Dédé. Dédé's in a killing mood. That's why Loulou had to call for help, all the way to California. But Johnny Boy doesn't know what he's gotten into, do you, Johnny? This is Paris, not Hollywood. You may have picked the wrong side. If you ask me, Johnny, you'd better try a cease-fire.”

“Shut her up, Cage,” said Johnny Vee hoarsely. “Tell her to shut her goddam yap.”

“What makes you think I can shut her up?” I said.

“Because it's thanks to her, punk, that you're still alive,” he blurted through his teeth. “If it was up to me, you'd never have gotten out of Amsterdam.”

An illogical answer to the question, but what do you know?

I caught Valérie's eyes searching for mine in the rear-view. We locked in.

“How do you figure that one out, Val?” I asked her.

“It's easy,” she said, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “It's because of my father, Maître Merchadier, have you heard the name, Johnny? They told you about him, didn't they? One of the most powerful men in France. Let me tell you, Johnny, if anything happens to me, he'll never let you out of Paris alive. He'll have your private parts cut off and served with the hors d'oeuvres. You'd better believe that.”

How much of what she said was truth and how much bravado I couldn't say. It had a certain logic to it, though. In the carnage at hand, the mob could have disposed of me and Roscoe with relative impunity. But maybe not Valérie.

In any case, she'd read his mentality right on the button.

I could see his jaws working out of the corner of my eye. He jammed his gun into my ribs, at the same time yelling at the muscle next to him to shut her up.

The muscle shifted his gun from Roscoe, but for a minute it was like he didn't know what he was supposed to do with it.

This left Roscoe momentarily free, and my body stiffened in antiipcation.
Let's do it, man
! I shouted at him in my mind.
Grab the fucking gun
!

Only Roscoe wasn't grabbing anything.

He sat there, gray-faced. Like he hadn't heard.

When I glanced back at the rearview, Valérie's eyes were gone. They stayed gone. We went over the river and, still keeping to the boulevards, circled across the Left Bank. The traffic thinned some. We crossed the Avenue de la Porte d'Italie and stopped for a red light.

Johnny Vee told the driver to get us moving. The driver told him about the red light, in approximate English. Johnny Vee told him to fuck the red light. The driver shrugged, and with a jerk the Pontiac burst across the intersection.

Where was the goddam Law? I wondered.

But then, suddenly, it was too late for the Law.

Too late for Roscoe too, and Valérie's needle.

At the top of the Parc Montsouris, we pulled in to the curb. A man was waiting for us on the sidewalk in front of the Métro building that sits on top of the Cité Universitaire station. He had his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. He walked around in front of the car, and the driver hit the button that rolled down his window.

“You're behind schedule,” the man said in French.

The driver answered him in French. It was the traffic, he explained. They exchanged a few more words, then the man stood out in the traffic, blocking it, and waved us through.

“What did he say?” Johnny Vee asked tensely.

“He said we are behind schedule,” the driver answered. “Everything is in place. We can go right ahead.”

We rolled up to the end of the park and turned down the street that runs alongside it. Nobody was saying anything. You could feel it all right. The bugles were going to blow, a thousand bugles, and then Johnny Vee, in a strident voice that didn't sound like it belonged to him, started telling us what was about to happen.

16

Mention gang wars in Paris and right away the French think Chicago. It's a knee-jerk reaction, like they've seen too many reruns of
The Untouchables
. As far as Chicago goes, I've never been there and I'm in no hurry, but I doubt Al Capone, ever mobilized an army, complete with weaponry, such as went into action behind us that cold fall dusk.

I've already described Didier Delatour's hideaway: a handsome, ivy-covered house on a narrow, cobbled street of ivy-covered houses, with a back garden surrounded by a spiked fence that let out on another similar street. The area it's in forms a roughly triangular wedge, bounded by the Pare Montsouris, the Montsouris reservoir, and the big University of Paris hospital. By the time we got there, every exit hole had been plugged except ours. The Pontiac took care of that one all by itself, but just to make sure, there were two cars that pulled out from the curb behind us and blocked off the street once we'd turned in. There was just no way Delatour was going to get out alive, short of tunneling through to China.

The tactical problem was how the attackers were going to get in. Quickly and painlessly. A Paris house is built to resist intrusion. There are metal shutters that go across the windows, the walls are of stone or brick, the front doors are barricaded with various ingenious and allegedly burglar-proof devices. Nor was Dédé Delatour the type, given the circumstances, to play knock-knock-who's-there.

This was where Johnny Vee's “solution” came in.

It mayn't have been much of a plan, and I never did learn what he thought would happen if the first half of it worked. But it did have a certain element of surprise.

The surprise, very simply, was us.

Whereas if it failed, well, I guess that was part of the solution.

“You're taking us in, punk,” said Johnny Vee. “The three of you. You're gonna get out of the car, you and the cunt and Cleever, you're gonna walk up to the front door, you're gonna ring the fucking bell.”

“Suppose nobody's home,” I said.

“Don't worry about that, wise guy. And don't try to pull anything. There'll be enough guns behind you to kill you ten times over. You walk up there and you ring the fucking bell. You try to pull anything and you're dead. Now let's go.”

We were rolling slowly up the street. I remember thinking: What happens when they open the door? Maybe I even said it. I didn't have to, though. If and when the door opened, all hell would break loose. It would be every man for himself, the bugles blowing and the artillery blazing, and three people I knew were going to get caught in the crossfire. So why not at least make it four?

By this time we'd pulled up in front of the house.

“Get out!” said Johnny Vee. “You, Cleever, you and the cunt! Out! You walk around the front of the car, nice and easy.” Then, to the muscle next to him: “Get out and cover them.”

The two side doors opened. Roscoe got out, without resistance. And Valérie, and the muscle behind them.

“Now your turn, punk. Out! Nice and easy. Then wait for them. Then go ring the fucking bell.”

I opened the door, ducked my head, and stepped out onto the curb. The house was dark, the shutters drawn. It was so quiet you could have heard Aznavour singing at the Olympia.

If Aznavour was singing at the Olympia.

I glimpsed Roscoe and Valérie coming around the hood of the Pontiac. Presumably the muscle was crouched by the fender behind them. Presumably there were others hidden in the shadows across the street, behind the parked cars. But I couldn't see them.

I turned, ducking my head back into the car.

“What're you, chickenshit, Johnny?” I said. “Aren't you coming with us?”

Maybe it was the taunt, maybe it was Valérie's needling, maybe he'd always had it in his plan. I'll never know. But he came out then. Oh, he came out all right, but too fast, ducking his head, gun arm first.

I grabbed his arm and pulled with all my force, shouting, “
GET DOWN
!
GET DOWN
!” at the others.

I heard him curse. He tripped, his body came lunging forward, and I swung from the heels.

It had been a long time since I'd hit anybody as hard as I could. It felt good. Hell, it felt sensational! I was still shouting “
GET DOWN
!” and he skittered on the sidewalk and his body did a kind of crazy, arched catwalk bodies aren't made to do, and it tees me off, even now, to have to admit I had help.

The help could have come from the house or from across the street; it could even have been aimed at me. But I heard the crack of it, sharp like the snap of a whip, and it caught lohnny Vee smack in the crosshairs.

Somebody, somewhere, had panicked and pulled the trigger. Johnny Vee went down. And if there were no bugles, that was all the signal anybody needed.

I heard the shutters bang above me. I dove for cover. I hit cement hard and tried to crawl into it, and when I ran out of cement, I crawled into dirt, into plants, ivy, into brick, anywhere. Because by then the very roof of the world was falling on my head.

There was somebody home all right. When that single shot cracked out, the whole building came alive in a firestorm as quick and lethal as World War III, like the house itself was one multibarreled gun trained on the street and pouring down a hail of lead on anything and everything, animate, inanimate, living, dead.

At first, once Johnny's “surprise” had blown, they had the edge too. The fire field was theirs, also the protection of the house, while the attackers in the street were pinned down behind improvised cover and forced to shoot uphill into a rain of terror. Their advantage, though, was shortlived. When equalized it was that Dédé Delatour was a fixed and immobilized target, attacked from the rear as well as the front. And what made it unequal was that Leduc's hybrid battalions had weapons you can't buy at your corner gun shop.

Grenade launchers, for one.

I hadn't been around live grenades in a long time, not, in fact, since that other war I've referred to, the forgotten Big K, where everybody who could bugged out, and everybody who couldn't shit his pants. I'd as soon not remember it. Suffice it that my instinct was the same: to burrow, to dig, digging into dirt and brick with my hands, feet, body, teeth, digging like a crazy mole. Because every time I lifted my head out of the muck, it was like the building, the street, the whole nutty world was shaking and cracking like a Jell-o mold caught in an earthquake.

Nowadays they go in for some pretty sophisticated varieties: “offensive” grenades, and “defensive,” and grenades that only blind and deafen. These, though, were just the old-fashioned killing kind, and a couple of them bounced off the façade of the house and exploded in the street behind me. The world shook, all right, and I felt the heat when a car went up in flames. But some of them got inside through the windows, and when they went off, in a series of sucking, ear-splitting implosions, World War III, from a strategic point of view, was as good as over.

I wasn't there to see Delatour and a couple of others try to fight their way out through the stone statuary in the back garden, and I wasn't there later when the Law tried to count the holes in their bodies. What I did see, though, like marionettes in some flickering dream, was grown men running out of the front door and being gunned down before they got to the sidewalk. And even one, his hands above his head and shouting, who was held upright for what seemed a long last lifetime by bullets stitching his body.

The battle had become a pigeon shoot, sickening and deadly, and what was amazing about it was that one of them managed to get through.

I saw him do it.

He came through the doorway in a low, wisplike trajectory and flung himself into the shadows, to where your hero was getting up into a dazed crouch. He was more shadow than human, a little wimp of a shadow, and somehow the bullets missed. He was making an awful throat sound, caught between a whimper and a keening. He had his cutlery in his fist, ready to rip at the first human object he met. And the first human object was me.

I've talked about self-preservation. I believe in it more than I do in heroics. I'd rather talk than fight, rather duck, rather dig, and this for the simple reason that, nine times out of ten, the medals got awarded posthumously. But there are moments, thankfully rare, when talking, ducking, digging do you no good. When the cornered rat brings out the cornered rat.

Jeannot sprang at me. He got in one good swipe. It came from the bottom, and he aimed it low, and if I'd been standing still, he'd have opened me up from groin to chin. At that I heard a ripping sound, but if part of rip was my own skin, I hardly noticed. Because by then I had his neck in a lock; that was what I wanted. He slipped, and I slipped with him. He was strong for his size, as slippery as he was strong, and he slashed with the knife, and a couple of times he must have struck home, but that didn't matter either. I had his neck. It wasn't judo or kung fu; if you've got to give it a name, call it the old Yakima grapple, but it was what I wanted. And I squeezed with everything I had, squeezed with a guttural, dam-bursting emotion that was close to joy. And by and by the knife dropped out of his hand.

When I let him go, he slipped out of my arms like a bag of stones.