The French Kiss Read online

  “WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK I AM? THE TELEPHONE DIRECTORY?”

  With that she slammed her door in my face. A moment later, though, the edge of the curtain pulled back from her street-level window. She evil-eyed me as I got into the Giulia. I sent her back a double whammy just for luck, because she’d given me a bright idea.

  THE EXCEPTIONAL DETECTIVE AGENCY

  ELECTRONIC METHODS

  ABSOLUTE DISCRETION

  ALL CONFIDENTIAL MISSIONS

  J.-C. Fleurie, Directeur

  had its offices above a cut-rate shoe store over on the Boulevard de Sebastopol. It’s what’s called a mixed commercial district. Nearby, in no particular order, are the Chatelet theatres, the city hall, the old site of the Paris markets (currently the world’s biggest man-made hole-in-the-ground) and the Rue St. Denis, which is the liveliest open-air whorehouse west of Bangkok. According to the full-column ad in the Paris yellow pages, the people down at Exceptional Detective would be glad to undertake motorcycle and radio-car surveillance for you, absolute discretion guaranteed, but neither the 204 nor the Renault 5 had had so much as an antenna and the only electronic equipment in sight was a small-screen TV on which J.-C. Fleurie, Directeur, was watching a rugby match when I came in.

  The bigger the ad, you learn in Paris, the seedier the operation. Exceptional’s offices consisted of one medium-sized room. Two metal desks faced the door, the vacant one with a typewriter under a plastic cover, and there were some metal shelves and file cabinets, a fake-leather two-seater and a couple of metal armchairs with fake-leather bottoms. A pendulum clock in a wood box hung on the wall, but its hands were pointed respectively at nine and ten and the pendulum had long since given up the ghost. It was the kind of place that lacked only a water cooler to make it homey. Gentle waves of cigar smoke drifted near the ceiling and the TV was turned up full blast to fight the traffic noise.

  J.-C. Fleurie, a large and drooping man in a cardigan sweater, waved in the general direction of the metal chairs, then redevoted his attention to the match. I stayed on my feet and watched while the ball squirted out of a roiling mass of bodies. It was lateraled from player to player till it reached the last man near the sideline, who kicked it back into the middle of the field, where it disappeared into another roiling mass. The referee’s whistle stopped play.

  For some reason the sportscaster seemed to find this a sensational exploit. So did J.-C. Fleurie. He slapped his desk with a meaty palm, exclaiming “C’est ça, le rugby!”—at which I leaned across his desk and turned off the set.

  He looked up at me, frowning in a hurt, puzzled expression.

  “I’m sorry to spoil your fun, Monsieur,” I said, “but I want to know where Madame Dove is. I want to know now.”

  The puzzlement stayed in his dewlaps.

  “Madame …?”

  “Dove,” I said. “D-O-V-E.”

  “I’m afraid I …”

  “Of course not. I’m sure you’ve never heard of her. Like you’ve never heard of me either, or had your stooges tailing me for the last few days. Cage is the name, Monsieur. C-A-G-E.”

  He’d started to stammer something in reply, but at the sound of my name he broke it off. Then to my surprise he beamed broadly. He clapped his hands and stood, his arms spreading wide, and squeezed between the desks, seized my hand and started thumping me on the back.

  I freed myself, only for him to take me in a garlic-filled embrace.

  “What a pleasure!” he exclaimed. “More than a pleasure, a great honor, Monsieur! To meet an illustrious American colleague! In person! An honor, Monsieur, we’ll drink to that!”

  He let me go, and pulling open a file drawer, produced a bottle of Pastis, another of water, and a pair of dusty café glasses which he plunked down on the desk. Ahhh, he went on as he poured two measures of the yellow liquid, how he’d always wanted to meet one of us in person, the great ones, Philippe Marlowe, Samu-el Spade, Lewis Archaire—he knew us all by reputation! He asked me if I wanted water and without waiting for an answer, filled both glasses to the brim. Apologizing for the lack of ice, he handed mine across, then with a “Salut!” quaffed deeply from his, sighed, smacked his lips, and launched into a florid exposé of the miseries of the investigating profession in France. Because they were only poor cousins in comparison to us, barely eking out a living, working (with a disparaging sweep of his hand) in sordid conditions, I could see for myself, hounded by the authorities, degraded by the press. But was it true what he’d heard about America? That we had offices on the fortieth floors of the skyscrapers? And all that new equipment?—he’d seen it in some film. And whole staffs of girls working for us? Ahhh, he said, kissing his fingertips, the beautiful girls!

  I wondered what movies he’d been seeing. In any case, though, there was no stopping him. Because all that new electronic stuff, those high-priced gadgets—they’d been around to try to sell him too, he said, with their fancy catalogues—that was only to impress the clients, wasn’t it? Because what good was it to any self-respecting investigator? When it came down to it, was there anything to replace the hard-working investigator with his nose to the ground? Of course not! answered J.-C Fleurie. Times changed, but men didn’t!

  By this time he’d regained his chair. His cardigan billowed around him. With a glance at mine, he refilled his own glass and produced a pair of cigars.

  I shook my head at the cigar and put my glass down on his desk.

  “It’s been nice meeting you too, Monsieur Fleurie,” I said. “Maybe we can swap stories some other time. But right now I need to know where Madame Dove is. If you don’t know, one of your boys does. The one who picks his nose.”

  “Ahhh, Pierrot,” he said, and then he chuckled, and then his eyes moistened at a new thought. “You’ll have to forgive me, my dear colleague. It is immoral, I know—the height of immorality—for one of us to take an assignment against another. Worse than immoral, it’s an insult to our noble profession! Normally I would have refused, out of hand. And then, the operatives we have to work with these days … lamentable. Tell me, how long did it take for you to spot them?”

  “Madame Dove, Monsieur,” I repeated.

  “Ah yes,” he said. “Spoken like a true investigator. Single-minded. Admirable.” He paused, nipped the end of his cigar with his teeth, lit it, then eyed me through the curling smoke. “But I don’t know myself, Monsieur. I’m a captive to this humble office. Chained to a desk. In fact I’m waiting for a report myself.”

  It could have been true. Or he could have been lying through his rhetoric.

  “In that case I’ll wait with you,” I said. “But there’s one other thing too. Just as one member of the profession to another, of course, but I want to know who’s paying you to keep an eye on me. And her.”

  “Who’s paying …?” he began. Then the corners of his mouth turned down and he shook his head. I disappointed him, he said. How I disappointed him. Greatly disappointed. He touched his hand to his heart, Victor-Hugo-style, and looking away, rambled off about honor and professional ethics. In any event, he let on, the assignment was over as far as I was concerned. He’d only taken it in the first place … well, if he hadn’t, someone else would have. And as he said, he didn’t think they’d have to inconvenience me any more. Of course he ought to consult his client first, but perhaps if I insisted … an exception … in the interests of professional courtesy …?

  I insisted. Little by little his eyelids lowered. We had reached a point where calculation had mostly taken over from ethics—calculation, I figured, as to how much one professional might charge another for professional courtesy—when the phone rang.

  “Forgive me, mon cher,” said J.-C. Fleurie, leaning forward to take the receiver. Then: “This is Exceptional, I’m listening.”

  Listen he did. It took a while, and the longer it took the more his face sagged. It had a natural sag to it, but now his dewlaps developed dewlaps and the chins seemed to multiply on his chest. Like a Slinky toy working its way down
stairs, I thought. The lids closed almost entirely over his eyes, and his complexion, which had gone ruddy at moments of high oratory, now grayed steadily in the darkening light. He didn’t look at me once. He focused on a ballpoint which he held upright on the desk. From time to time his fingers slid down to the base, then reversed the pen and started again from the top.

  The vibrations were very bad. They got worse. Whoever he was talking to—and there were two of them—was asking questions about somebody. Apparently the somebody was me. I was there, J.-C. Fleurie said. He glanced at his watch. He swallowed. He said yes, it was serious. Yes, he agreed it was very serious. Very. And even before I heard him say Monsieur le Commissaire I was ready to agree with him.

  I got up. Maybe J.-C. Fleurie misinterpreted my intentions. In any case, he was a lot quicker than I’d given him credit for. The ballpoint dropped on the desk, and in the same motion he pulled out a drawer and produced a stubby black collector’s item with a snubnosed barrel. He pointed it at me. I heard the safety click. You wonder at times like that if they’d really shoot if you started out the door. But you’d hate to guess wrong. He finished the conversation with the phone in one hand and the collector’s item in the other. He kept it on me when he hung up, steady-handed, and even when one of his stooges came in later, the one I’d last seen sprinting down the side street from the Boulevard St. Germain.

  J.-C. Fleurie’s attitude, I should say, was more of sorrow than of anger. Call it his Paris-isn’t-Chicago attitude. He didn’t like firearms, he said, and it offended him greatly to have to hold an illustrious colleague against his will. He didn’t want me to think either that he was used to working with the Police Judiciaire or liked it any better than anyone in our profession would. As far as he was concerned, he was sure I could explain where I’d been that afternoon. As far as he was concerned, he’d be ready to let me go on my honor. But the matter was out of his hands, and there were times when one had no choice but to cooperate with the authorities. He hoped I would understand that.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, Monsieur Fleurie,” I said. “If anything’s happened to her, I’m going to twist your head off.”

  He stared at me, uncomprehending.

  “To Binty Dove,” I said.

  But it wasn’t to Binty that it had happened, at least as far as J.-C. Fleurie knew. It was to a member of his staff—Pierrot, the nosepicker, as it turned out. He’d been found dead, with a hole in him, in the forest of Montmorency, in the Paris suburbs.

  TEN

  I could explain, and it could be checked out, and I did, and it was. But in between Commissaire Dedini had a field day with me, and this time there weren’t even any sandwiches.

  I suppose I didn’t help my own cause much. Maybe we were all scum, Dedini included, but apparently there were grades of scum. It wasn’t either that Pierrot the Nosepicker was a cop, albeit a private one. It was that he was French, French-born and bred and dead. Apparently that made all the difference.

  “And I thought the French weren’t racist,” I said to Dedini.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Jonnie Davis, Monsieur le Commissaire. Jonnison Davis, remember him? The body you fished out of the Canal St. Martin? What did you do with him, plant him six feet under and throw away the shovel? What’s the difference between then and now? Was it because he was only an American? Or only a nigger?”

  Dedini stared across at me, over the tops of his glasses.

  “You may come to regret that remark, Monsieur,” he said.

  “Maybe so,” I retorted, “but before you start handing out the threats this time you’d better check it out first with Bernard Lascault and his friends. Or at least with Commissaire Ravier. Who knows? Maybe they’ll want you to cover it up again.”

  In fact I think he did. In fact I know he did. But either their hands were tied this time by the fact that the crime had been committed outside of Paris, or the people who were pulling the strings had changed their signals. Because where Dedini had been effectively muzzled over Jonnie Davis, this time the opposite pressure was on him. Assuming, as I did, that he was the kind of cop who acted according to pressure.

  As far as I was concerned, it was easy enough to trace and verify my whereabouts. Fleurie’s stooge had placed me in the café on the Boulevard St. Germain. Theoretically it would have been possible for me to follow Pierrot from the café to Montmorency and make it back to the Exceptional Detective Agency before the end of the rugby match. But there were the people at the hotel and the two concierges in the 15th to back up my version.

  The rub was that there was no way to keep Binty out of it. Fleurie’s stooge had her in the café with me, and the hotel before that, and Pierrot had gone off after her. Dedini seemed particularly affronted by the notion that I could have spent twenty-four hours in a hotel with a woman and not know where she’d gone afterward. Probably it offended his sense of chivalry. Then too, whether he liked it or not, the name of Bernard Lascault kept cropping up. The apartment in the 15th was owned by Bernard Lascault, and so was the voice on the tape that answered the telephone. The relationship between Madame Dove and Monsieur Lascault, I said, was strictly business as far as I knew, which made Dedini raise his eyebrows, which made me want to yank them down. But in this regard the Law drew a blank too.

  As far as I knew.

  It was 11:30 P.M. before they’d finished with me. Well, but of course they’d other things to do.

  Among them was a letter. It was addressed to me, on Prefecture of Police stationery, and all fancily done up, down to the “expression of my distinguished sentiments” with which it concluded. The signature was illegible, the language officialese, and there were Articles quoted and Codes cited, but the gist of the message was that I had twenty-four hours to conclude my affairs, pack my bags, and leave French soil. In other words, persona non grata, and if I was still on the premises twenty-four hours hence, the implication was that I’d be escorted to the nearest border and summarily dumped on the other side.

  Actually, as Dedini pointed out, I had twenty-four hours and thirty minutes. It was only 11:30 P.M. or 23:30 as the French count it. The expulsion order wouldn’t go into effect until 00:01 two days hence.

  Their generosity overwhelmed me. But apparently that wasn’t Dedini’s doing either. If he’d had his way, he said, I’d be spending the twenty-four and a half hours under lock and key.

  “And what recourse do I have?” I asked him.

  “Recourse, Monsieur?”

  “I mean, I happen to be enjoying myself in Paris. I suppose there must be some sort of appeal procedure, in the land of liberty, equality, and fraternity.”

  He smiled at me, in a grim sort of way.

  “There’s only one that I know of,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “If you were to produce Monsieur and Madame Dove before the time runs out. Then perhaps this document could be torn up.”

  “How do you want them, Monsieur le Commissaire? With their heads on separate platters?”

  For an answer he turned to one of his bloodhounds, creaking his chair, said:

  “Get him out of my sight!”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have taken it personally. Maybe it was just his way of saying au revoir.

  The moon was up when I came out of the Quai des Orfèvres. The Seine was a ghostly ribbon curling and snaking under the bridges and somewhere Leslie Caron had to be pirouetting on the river bank, waiting for Gene Kelly to buck-and-wing out of the mists. At that time of a Saturday night, the crowds on St. Michel, just across the river, would be elbow to elbow the width of the sidewalks, lovers and hawkers and pickpockets and panhandlers and flame swallowers, and the youth of all nations with packs strapped to their backs and guitars in one hand and hot Tunisian sandwiches in the other. Springtime in the seventies, brought to you by the makers of Paris, France, and too bad there was no place in it for me.

  I was the uninvited guest, the man who came to dinner, the
fifth wheel, the odd man out. I wasn’t the only one either. Al Dove was in the same boat, and from what Dedini had implied, Binty was too. The boat was leaking like a sieve, and it was a case of abandon ship, every man for himself, and don’t forget the loot. And people were getting killed in the ruckus. And a sap called Cage was standing by himself in the engine room with a mop and a bucket, wondering where all the water was coming from.

  I walked up the quay toward the Pont St. Michel. A car eased alongside me. At first I took it for the Law—Dedini’s way of proving a point—but the Law doesn’t ride around in 403’s any more and Peugeot quit making them some ten years back.

  I stopped at the corner. So did the 403. I looked down at the driver. He looked out at me. To judge, things were going from bad to worse in the private detective business.

  “Get in, Monsieur,” said J.-C. Fleurie.

  “Suppose I don’t feel like getting in?” I said.

  “Then probably you won’t get in, Monsieur,” said J.-C. Fleurie.

  He looked like he’d swallowed his bonhomie. By a process of elimination I’d pretty much deduced who his client was, also that the party he’d been after hadn’t been me, not at all, but when I tried it on him for size, he buttoned up and stared ahead through the windshield. He was shook all right. Maybe the Law was responsible for it, but it may also have been the idea that my fancy footwork that afternoon had cost him half his staff.

  And in that he wouldn’t have been altogether wrong.

  I got in. We turned left across the Cité and the other snake of the Seine, then onto the Right Bank. I thought we were heading for his office. We passed it by though, and continued on another couple of blocks, then stopped for a red light.

  “I’ll have you know I’m leaving the case, Monsieur,” J.-C. Fleurie said, his gaze fixed on the windshield. “This commission is my last.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Maybe we’ll be able to work together … another time.”

  He didn’t answer.