The Stiff Upper Lip Page 13

  The script called for a little rough stuff then, and Johnny Vee was never one to disappoint his biographers. It was mostly for show, though. A travel agency on the Prinsengracht, after all, is no place for blood and guns. Then Johnny’s muscle had me out on the canal bank, and the last thing I saw before they shoved me into the car and put on the blindfold was that Wallace Edner had disappeared, and the Beetle with him.

  There were five of us in the car. The one with the submachine gun and Johnny himself surrounded me in the back seat. The two up front were slant-eyed talent, courtesy of Mr. Lee. It was a combined operation all right, but what I didn’t realize then was that we were only the rear guard of an army.

  13

  In between then and nightfall, Johnny Vee had time for some funning with me.

  “You’re really stooping low, punk,” he said. “When you pimped for the rich, you were still a punk, but at least you had some class then. Now you’re down to coons and their French cunts. That’s stooping pretty low, if you ask me.”

  “Nobody asked you,” I said.

  I was sitting in a chair, backed against the wall of a room which was next to a sort of air shaft. I figured we were still in Amsterdam. I was tied to the chair, something that was getting to be a habit with me, with my legs straddled outside the chair legs. They’d taken the blindfold off. Johnny Vee was standing in front of me, one foot propped on the seat of the chair. The tip of his shoe was about three inches from my scrotum, and the rest of him was leaning over me, rocking slightly. I got a good whiff of brilliantine.

  “The French cunt’s not bad, honh?” he said. “A little skinny in the ass, the French cunts always are, but she handles good. From what I hear, she ought to, isn’t that so, punk?”

  I didn’t answer, not even when he rocked closer with the tip of his shoe.

  “Where’s Cleever, punk?” he said. “Or what is it he calls himself now? Hadley? Where’s Hadley, punk?”

  I didn’t answer that either.

  “Maybe the cunt’ll tell us, whadda you think? D’you want me to bring her in here and fuck her in front of you?”

  His face was close to mine, and grinning.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I always wondered if you could get it up.”

  The grin vanished and his head jerked back. At the same time his foot slammed forward, catching me full in the balls. My chair smacked against the wall. A shock of pain shot toward my brain, but then it splintered, north, east, south, west. My eyes watered and a spurt of vomit surged into my throat. For some reason, I fought it down.

  Johnny Vee was standing back. He was laughing his guinea head off.

  “D’you think we needed you to find him?” he shouted. “You’re dumb, punk! I always knew you were dumb, but they must’ve thrown away the mold after you! Whaddid you think? That Cleever and the cunt could walk into a town like this and out again? You’re in against the pros this time, punk! And you’re nothing’ but a fuckin’ amatoor! We had Cleever and the cunt fingered two days ago!”

  My eyes started to clear. I salivated, tasted vomit, swallowed.

  “Who’s we?” I said weakly.

  “Me and the Dutch, dumbie. The careful, punctual Dutch.”

  “What took you so long?”

  “We were waiting on you, dumbie, whadda you think?”

  He made a big grinning thing out of what he was going to do with me. He said he’d told Delatour to cut my balls off. He said he’d told the Chink to use them for fish bait and dump the rest of me into the canal. He had similar projects in mind for Roscoe and Valérie. All in all, he was very big on genitals, was Johnny Vee.

  After a while, though, he must have run short of ideas. He went out, leaving me in the keep of his muscle. Little by little the pain localized in my scrotum, and while it throbbed, I tried to sort out what had happened.

  Any way you sliced it, it looked like a disaster for the home team. If Roscoe or Valérie was still on the loose, that kick in the balls would only have been for openers. I wondered, though, what they’d done about Nico. You didn’t mess around with a van den Luyken in Holland and expect the Law to look the other way. Maybe Johnny Vee would have tried if he was acting on his own, but clearly he wasn’t. On the other hand, I could only speculate as to what he was doing there, six thousand miles from home, and it didn’t enter my head then that he’d changed sides.

  They waited till dark, I think, to move me. If I’m vague about the timing, it’s because of the coffee. At some point, there was a lot of stirring around in the hall outside, and somebody came in and asked me if I wanted a cup. I’d have liked whiskey better, but coffee would do. The guy who’d been handling the submachine gun on the Prinsengracht brought it in and fed it to me. Or tried to. I took a sip, gagged, and spat it out. In the end it took two of them to get it down, one forcing my jaws open while the other poured. I gagged and sputtered and hollered and spat, but some of it got past my gullet, enough anyway so that later, when they put the blindfold back on and cut me loose, I was already wobbling and disoriented.

  A Chinese recipe, I presume.

  They had to take off the blindfold for border crossings and toll booths. It didn’t make any difference. I was sandwiched in the back seat between two of my fellow countrymen, and when we came through a checkpoint, one of them shoved a gun into me, high on the ribs under the armpit. He needn’t have bothered with that either. Whatever had been in the coffee, it had set up a barrier between my brain and my voice, and my tongue felt like a slab of concrete laid between my teeth. When I dozed off, I thought I was still awake; when I was awake, it was like I was dreaming. The car, I remember, was a Citroën, a CX in the 2000 series. I remember seeing the big single windshield wiper slicking back and forth across the oncoming headlights, back and forth, and some synapse of insight a long way off told me it must be raining. I remember stopping at the frontier—probably it was the one between Mons and Valenciennes—and the guard taking the passports from the driver and crouching to look into the car, and it was like I was looking back at him from inside two long lasers of light, and my mind was shouting NICO! TELEPHONE! NICO! SO fucking loud it set off shivers of nausea in the light tunnels. But if Nico was still alive, then he hadn’t called, or if he’d called, then they hadn’t answered at the other end, or if they’d answered at the other end, then Frérejean had sent out the word by ordinary mail and the border posts wouldn’t get the message till the Wells Fargo express made the next run north from Paris. Because all the guard did at the end of the light tunnels was count eyeballs and divide by two and compare and contrast to the number of passports he held in his hand, which he handed back to the driver, who handed them to his partner, and off we rolled out of the tunnels into the blackness of the République Française. Then I must have dropped off again, because what I saw was. signs, one after the other, sweeping in over my head with the regularity of telephone poles when you’re looking out a train window, and the signs said PARIS PARIS PARIS, white block letters on a dark field, and there were white stub arrows under the words sweeping me through, one after the other.

  I’ve said we were only the rear guard of an army. There must have been at least three such cars rolling south that night toward Paris, but as it turned out, the main forces were already waiting for us. Somewhere between the Survilliers toll booth and the end of the autoroute, they tied my hands behind my back and put the blindfold on again. The drug seemed to be wearing off. I could tell that when we hit the Porte de la Chapelle interchange we turned west onto the Périphérique, and we went on for a few exits—the Porte de St. Ouen maybe, or Clichy—before entering the city itself. But then the disorientation took over again—cobbles, smooth pavement, more cobbles—and when we stopped, all I knew about the end of the line was that it was somewhere near the northern rim of Paris.

  I shivered briefly in cold air. Then we were inside a building and going up in an elevator. The elevator was one of those old-fashioned jobs, built for families of midgets. Three of us, I think, wedged in toget
her. I heard the gate clank shut. Then we went up slowly, maybe to the top. When we got out on the landing, a door opened immediately. I was shoved inside. I could hear voices, several of them. They were talking in French.

  We went down what was probably a hallway, a very long one with hooks in it. In front of me, somebody said, “On va le mettre ici, celui-là,” which meant, “We’ll put this one here.” Then I was pushed forward until something hit me hard, about mid-thigh. I heard a door shut behind me, a lock turn.

  They left it to me to get the blindfold off. This meant untying my hands first. This I did eventually, with the help of a friendly faucet. What I’d bumped into was a bathroom sink. The bathroom, to judge, had also been designed for midgets, and it was unused. I found a light switch, but it turned out there was no bulb in the ceiling socket. With the coming of false dawn, a faint light penetrated the half-window in the back wall. By then, though, feeling my way around, I’d already identified the furnishings: a sink, a sit-up bathtub, a bidet under the window, a waist-high wall cupboard.

  The cupboard was empty. There were no plugs in the drains. Only cold water ran though the taps.

  I spent quite a while splashing my face with the cold water. This had a weirdly tonic effect. It set all sorts of projects flushing through my brain.

  I was going to make a rope out of my clothes and go out the window. If I couldn’t get to the ground, I could at least get to a window on the floor below. If I couldn’t get to a window on the floor below, at least I’d attract some attention.

  This necessitated getting the window open first. Standing on the bidet in order to reach it, I found out that the window was painted shut, not just the lock but all the seams.

  This didn’t seem much of an obstacle. If worse came to worst, I could knock the glass out with my fist. To do it quietly enough, all I had to do was wrap my shirt around my fist.

  This necessitated getting my shirt off.

  If the window was too small for me to get my body through, I could always plug up the drain of the sink with my shirt and let the water overflow till it seeped through the floorboards. Failing that, I could write a message on a piece of my shirt and send it out through the plumbing.

  If I could find a pen.

  If I couldn’t, I could always use blood.

  Most of these ventures required my getting my shirt off. I remember trying. The next thing I remember, it was still on and I was waking up on the floor. My body was hugging the sit-in bathtub. I had a blinding headache and the nausea was pulsing through me in monotonous waves.

  I threw up in the sink and felt a little better. It was light outside. Standing on the bidet, I realized it was just as well I hadn’t gotten my shirt off. We were high up, very high for that part of Paris. Below me were the corners of some rooftops. They looked like quite a jump away. Beyond them, the buildings sloped up quickly, and humped up against the gray sky above them I saw the white rear façade of Sacré Coeur.

  This put me somewhere behind the Butte Montmartre, in the back of the 18th Arrondissement.

  I sat down on the little step in the bathtub. My watch said ten after two. I wound it some. It still said ten after two.

  A little later they came for me.

  14

  If the bathroom had been designed for midgets, it was the only such part of the apartment. Probably my wing was for servants. The other rooms I glimpsed from the hallway were big and empty, and not only empty but bare, uninhabited.

  All, that is, except for two.

  One escort went up the hallway in front of me, another behind. They had a kind of hoody elegance about them, like they were going to a wedding or a funeral. I didn’t recognize either one.

  We stopped outside a pair of double doors. They were closed, but I could hear voices inside. The front escort knocked. Somebody opened from the inside, and I was ushered in.

  In the old days they’d have called this the salon. Nowadays, in the real-estate ads, it would go as a double living room, which meant two large rooms separated by an archway. Running their length on the far side was a series of glass-paned double doors that gave onto a terrace, with a view of the Butte Montmarte. The terrace doors were closed when I came in, but I saw a couple of muscle taking the air outside.

  The room to my left was empty except for a long buffet table covered with white napery. There were cups and saucers stacked on it, and silver pots on trays, and glasses of various sizes backed by an assortment of bottles. From time to time, while I was there, people went in and helped themselves. Except for those who rated service.

  It was strictly a suit-and-tie affair. Those who rated service—some eight men in all—sat in a semi-circle, each with a small end-table next to him. Johnny Vee, the new boy in town, was the youngest of the semi-circle by a pretty fair margin. He’d changed sides, all right. He was also the most subdued Johnny Vee I’d ever seen, though this may have been due to language as well as to the generation gap. A ninth man sat close to him and a little behind, and served as interpreter. Behind them circulated a motley of muscle, including a couple of Americans, but except for an unlikely bulge here and there, I saw no signs of artillery.

  The only woman on hand was Valérie Merchadier. They had her in the middle of a row of three chairs, facing the semi-circle and the terrace beyond it. Roscoe slouched in the far chair. Neither of them was bound, but each had a guard standing close behind.

  Valérie’s eyes followed me in. A little bedraggled, but physically intact. Roscoe, though, was another story. His body had gone slack, limp, like somebody’d taken him by the scruff, like a rag doll, and shaken too long. His gaze was vague, unseeing, and a bad-looking gash ran west from the bridge of his nose across the cheekbone. Conceivably he’d put up a struggle when they took him. More likely, I thought, Johnny Vee had been dividing his leisure time.

  The empty chair was for me. I sat down, blinking in the harsh sunlight that came from the terrace and trying to identify the expression I’d seen in Valérie’s eyes.

  I hadn’t seen it before. It wasn’t surprise. It took me a little while to realize, simply, that she was scared stiff.

  With reason, I’ll add. The discussion was in French, and to judge from the smoke that layered up toward the ceiling, it had been going on for some time. In form, it could have been any business conference anywhere. What was disconcerting, though, was that it went on even after I’d been brought in. Like I wasn’t there. Whereas, given what they were talking about, I kind of doubted they intended to make it public.

  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!”