The Stiff Upper Lip (18 page)

A spare, bony Frenchman with tired and well-bagged eyes was doing most of the talking. I took him for the chairman of the board. It was only later that I realized that he was just fronting for the man to his right. His name, I found out subsequently, was Verucci, and he handled the language like an orator. He also had a police record as long as your arm.

When I got there, Verucci was in the midst of some sort of summing up. It was agreed, he said in substance, that order should be restored, in Paris and elsewhere, by the quickest possible means. The plan proposed to the council was accepted; it would be executed without delay. The offer of collaboration from their new American colleague (here he turned and nodded briefly toward Johnny Vee) was also accepted. Once the problem of the competition was resolved and order restored, the new marketing arrangements would go into effect immediately. Insofar as sports were concerned—
le sport
, as he put it—and particularly those sectors which employed foreign athletes, namely
le basket
, this would now come under the supervision of their American colleague, through the interposed parties as agreed.

What I took this to mean, allowing for the flourishes of Verucci's tongue and the hazards of translation, was (1) that Dédé Delatour was to be erased, quickly and violently; (2) that the dope traffic in France was to be consolidated under mob control; and (3) that the new, if hidden, czar of French basketball was that eminent California sportsman, Johnny Vee.

He was still climbing, was Johnny Vee. He'd just gone multi-national.

The vote went around the semi-circle. Some of them grunted; some of them just nodded. Nobody dissented.

There was a stirring then, like it was coffee-break time.

“
Bien
,” said the man to Verucci's right, speaking for the first ime. “
Et ces trois-là
?”

He was referring to the three of us.

The stirring stopped.

I could see what Valérie had meant when she'd called him a
caïd
. It was a question of authority. He was bulky and old, with a massive head in which presided two deep-sunk dark eyes. He had a ruined trunk of a nose with a mole on it, and white hair growing out of the mole, and thinning wisps of white hair on his skull.

Down among the Allah-worshipers, a
caïd
is at once the judge and the chief of police. In other words, when Leduc spoke, the stirring stopped.

Verucci introduced us then, succinctly.

The black was an American. He played basketball professionally. He'd worked for the other black, the one who was dead.

The woman was his concubine. She was also the daughter of the lawyer Merchadier.

As for me, I was a small-time American detective, operating in Paris.

Not much of an epitaph.

We'd been the cause of considerable embarrassment to the council, Verucci went on. We had also embarrassed their colleague in Amsterdam. We had also, in the past, embarrassed Monsieur Vee.

At this point, Leduc pulled Verucci's sleeve. The spokesman leaned down and Leduc said something in his ear.

“Yes,” Verucci said, straightening up. “Accessorily, there is the question of depositions. The detective Cage told our colleague in Amsterdam that the black had prepared depositions describing our activities in certain areas. Should anything happen to him, Cage threatened, these documents would be given wide publicity. According to the black and his concubine, however, no such documents exist. They …”

“I'm sorry, Cage!” Valérie blurted out. “I didn't know you'd …”

“
Shut up! Speak when spoken to!
”

Leduc's voice cracked out like thunder. He half rose out of his chair.

What Valérie said to him then, hissing the words, brought him the rest of the way to his feet.

Valérie's guard seized her from behind, tipping her chair back, and when I started forward, my windpipe ran into a forearm of steel. I went back too, in mid-air, while Leduc crossed the intervening space.

He moved with surprising quickness. Valérie kicked out at him, but knocked her leg aside and, stepping inside it, reached down and grabbed a handful of breast through her sweater.

I saw him wrench. I heard her gasp, cry out.

He let go. His chest was heaving. He stepped back and turned to me.

“You lied to the Chinaman,” he said. “The documents don't exist!”

It came out a statement, not a question, and the black glare followed from deep inside his skull.

I couldn't speak. At a nod from Leduc, the forearm relaxed its pressure. I felt the floor under my feet again.

“It doesn't matter what I say now, does it?” I answered. “Maybe they exist, maybe they don't, but how will you be able to tell whether I'm telling the truth? There's only one sure way for you to find out, Loulou.”

The forearm struck again. I guess the muscle didn't like hearing the boss addressed by his nickname. But Leduc waved him off.

“You like to live dangerously,” he said to me. “But either way, the black doesn't know enough about our operations to hurt us.”

“No? Well, maybe he does, maybe he doesn't, but that would be for the Law to judge, wouldn't it? And the press? It would depend, for one thing, on how much Grimes might have told him, if you see what I mean. But that's not the point, not at all. Don't you see?”

I leaned forward as far as I could get and raised my voice.

“You just decided—
all
of you—to get Delatour. A unanimous vote, isn't that right? And maybe you can,
probably
you can, even though Delatour's no shrinking violet. But a lot of people are likely to get killed in the bargain, and who's to say it'll end there? I never knew anybody worth a damn in your business who took needless risks, and if you ask me, you're about to take a monumental one. Whereas if you let Hadley do it for you, let him spill what he knows to the Law, they'd have enough on Delatour and his gang to put them on ice till we're all dead and buried.”

I had more to say than that and they let me say it all. I did it big. It was like I was on a free-throw line with the score tied and time run out. The crowd was on its feet and Rosco on the bench. It was up to Cage now. Now or never.

Only somehow I still held the ball in my hands. The longer I held it, the heavier it got. And when I was done talking, it was like a sphere full of mud.

The thing was: I'd been banking on being able to feed Delatour to the wolves and on the wolves being satisfied. Let Roscoe sing to the Law, let the Law hang Delatour, let Leduc's operations continue as before. All of which would depend, obviously, on how much influence Leduc had going for him.

But when I'd finished, Leduc spoke out, cold-eyed.

“You're too late with that now,” he said.

And that was all he said. And then he snapped his fists apart, like he was breaking a stick of wood.

What chilled my blood even more doesn't come through in English. French, like a lot of other languages, has two ways of saying “you.” One is
tu
, the other is
vous
.
Vous
is what you say in normal conversation.
Tu
is what the grammar books call the “intimate” form. That means you can use it in bed. But
tu
is also used in other I'm-on-top, you'reon-the-bottom situations. French parents, for instance, use it in talking to their children, and French masters to their servants, and the French generally to Ayrabs and blackamoors. And executioners, presumably, in that tender moment near the end when they ask their victim if they've any last requests.

What I'm getting at is that Loulou Leduc had used it on me.

15

Maybe it's the instinct for self-preservation, maybe the proverbial optimism of Americans, but I've always had trouble believing somebody would actually order up my extinction. Sure I've been in combat, and you could argue that the poor slobs shooting at me had been ordered to by some general in a war room with his finger on the map. But the general in question had slant eyes and yellow skin, and his target wasn't me, Cage, but anything that was white and moved. I've also been in man-on-man situations a few times where death by violence, mine or his, was a logical possibility, and once or twice I was plain lucky. But that somebody in power, somebody who'd laid eyes on me and talked to me in human conversation, could actually point the finger, saying, “That one, kill him,” and mean me, Cage, B. F., and not the guy down the street …

No. No way.

I came as close, though, to believing it that day as I ever have. We'd been a source of embarrassment to them. Alive, we'd continue to be. It didn't matter in this sense how much we knew, or how little. Dédé Delatour was to be eliminated, quickly and violently, bullets were going to fly and blood spill, and three more corpses in the body count wouldn't make a hell of a lot of difference.

In other words, the source of embarrassment would be removed. And when it comes to the mob, be it U.S. or French or Pakistani, there's only one way they go about such things.

After my exchange with Leduc, Verucci began to summarize the solutions that had been proposed in our regard. The one suggested by their American colleague merited particular attention, in his opinion. There were several other possibilities, but …

At this point, though, Leduc cut him off.

“Get them out of here,” he ordered peremptorily.

I expected us to be separated again. Then, when they stuck us in the empty room at the other end of the hallway, with armed muscle between us and the door, I thought we'd be called back to hear the verdict. But it didn't happen like that. Instead, we sat there on the bare floorboards, waiting, listening.

While Valérie hugged her knees.

And our star witness kept his back to the wall, his feet splayed out in front of him.

And the muscle sat on straight chairs.

And I tried to guess their American colleague's solution.

After a while, we swapped stories.

Valérie's, it turned out, was little different from mine. They'd taken her as soon as Wallace Edner and I left the Zeedijk bar, two men with guns and a car waiting outside. She'd been blindfolded too, part of the time, and Johnny Vee had worked her over personally in ways she didn't want to talk about. It damn near broke her up that she hadn't caught on about the depositions. What she'd said, on the spot, was that she didn't know anything about them. Later on, she'd been transported to Paris the same way I had, coffee included. She thought it had still been light outside when they left Amsterdam, but she wasn't sure.

Roscoe had been lifted right out of Nico's house, in broad daylight. The trouble was that there, on the floor of that empty room, he went into another non-remembering phase. It was like the stuffing had been knocked out of him and something else besides, and what was left you could only call a reversion to the nigger mentality: the idea that the honkies had fucked him over again, present company included, and not for the first time, and probably not for the last. About all we got out of him was that, either by design or accident, they'd grabbed him when Nico wasn't there. They'd come fast too, like it had been planned. That, and that the one who'd done the job on him later was also Johnny Vee.

The California sportsman, it seemed, had had a full day.

There was a ray of hope, though, in what Roscoe said, for people looking for rays of hope. That was Nico. I was pretty sure he'd have made the call to Frèrejean, given the chance. But I had no way of knowing if he'd been given the chance.

Time passed.

We heard people coming and going in the apartment.

At some point in the afternoon, the muscle guarding us were replaced by other muscle.

Meanwhile, we were still alive. I wasn't sure why, but by and by I began to get used to the idea, and the more I got used to it, the better I liked it. Call that self-preservation if you want to, but it started the adrenalin flowing again.

Sometimes, like I said, you take what you can get.

It was late afternoon when they took us down in the elevator, one by one.

We all met again, downstairs.

The car was a Pontiac, made in U.S.A., and about as inconspicuous on the Paris streets as a battleship on the Seine. The doors were open on the sidewalk side. There was a driver already behind the wheel, and one of the muscle in the back seat. He kept a cannon trained on me as I crossed the sidewalk.

Johnny Vee was standing next to the Pontiac. His jacket was open too. He was wearing twin chest holsters.

“All the comforts of home,” I said to him, nodding at the Pontiac. “Where're we going, Johnny Boy?”

“Yours to find out, punk,” he answered. “Get in.”

Valérie and Roscoe sat up front with the driver, Vale'rie in the middle. Roscoe had a deterrent at the back of his neck. Johnny's muscle held it. Johnny himself, in the middle of the back seat, held another one on me. This left Valérie unguarded, but, sandwiched as she was, she had no place to go.

We came out of the 18th Arrondissement and back onto the Périphérique. The sun had made a big try earlier in the day, but now the sky was gray again, uniformly. The air was cold, the light fading, the traffic fierce. It drove us off the Périphérique finally and onto the so-called Boulevards des Maréchaux. Before the Périphérique was built, these boulevards themselves constituted the outer rim of Paris, and though they make one long circling road, every few blocks the name changes. Ney, Soult, Poniatowski, Kellerman, Jourdan—all reminders of those nobler Napoleonic days when France used to win its share of the battles.

We made better progress on the boulevards, even with the traffic lights. Then, somewhere near the Bois de Vincennes, Valérie started working on Johnny Vee.

I'd already felt the tension building in him. Maybe he was a general, newly appointed, in the hierarchy of the mob, but right then in the Pontiac, weaving through Paris traffic on unfamiliar streets, he was no better off than a G.I. in No Man's Land. Any minute the bugles were going to blow, the booby-traps explode, and Johnny Vee was going to have to execute without thinking. His adrenalin was up, his concentration narrowed. At times like that, you don't want to think, much less talk, and the last thing you want is to be rattled.