The Stiff Upper Lip Read online

  Sure, and if pigs had wings, then we’d have to pluck feathers out of our morning bacon.

  Dumb thoughts, in other words. Dangerous thoughts for somebody in my line.

  Maybe that was the problem.

  Fact: Even though I’d never gotten around to sending him a bill, Roscoe Hadley had been my client. Fact: I became a kind of instant hero, at his expense.

  You could blame this last on the media, but the Law had a hand in it, and so did the popular taste for blood, crime, and sex. So, in her way, did my self-appointed partner. At the least, Valérie was used to celebrity. To judge, she also reveled in it, and the pictures they ran of her, in black, at Roscoe’s funeral, were nothing short of stunning.

  I missed the funeral. I watched it instead on the 8 O’Clock News, from a hospital bed. They made a hell of a couple, Valérie, live, and Roscoe, dead, and to heighten the poignancy, there were film clips of the mopping up at the Parc Montsouris. I saw Bobet too, and Frèrejean, and their boss, the Minister of the Interior, pushing his way between them to make sure the credit went where it was due. I even saw myself, in the hospital bed, naked to the waist except for bandages, and the newscaster was saying something like: “This intrepid American killed with his bare hands the killer who did this to him.”

  Blood, crime, and sex, and they did it up big. Well, it had been a long time since the Paris Law had won such a clear-cut victory against the forces of evil. Or so it could be made to appear. Killjoy that I am, I didn’t think the “organized dope trade in France” had been dealt a death blow. At least not a permanent one. Too many farmers in this happy-dust world of ours count on the poppy for their cash crop, and like all it takes to start a “travel agency” is a telephone and a little protection. I even said as much to the interviewer who came with the cameras, but, needless to say, they cut my spoken parts on TV.

  Rather than plead squeamishness, let me simply say that I switched off.

  Or tried to.

  In this respect, though, Parisians are no different from anybody else. All you’ve got to do is get your picture on the tube and it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, even if you’ve fucked up. In other words, a lot of people that season suddenly needed a private investigator, or thought they did, or just wanted to see what one looked and sounded like. Once I got out of the hospital, my phone didn’t stop ringing. The mail brought dinner invitations from people I’d never heard of, toal strangers were coming up to me on the street, and finally the only way to beat it was to skip town.

  Before I left, I took a ride on the Ligne de Sceaux. At odd insomniac moments, I’d been beset by this weird notion that it hadn’t happened the way I’ve told it. My eyes had lied, the media had lied—a collective delusion. The train had stopped in time; else it had come in on the righthand track. In reality, Roscoe had dropped out of sight that night, had gotten away, disappeared, and to find a trace of him, you’d have to go off into the future to some obscure country that hasn’t even been invented yet, where they’d just be starting to take up the game with the round ball and the hoop, and where there’d be rumors of a black giant with hands like scoops who was tearing the league apart.

  The pigs-have-wings syndrome, call it.

  I got on at the Gare de Luxembourg and rode out as far as Sceaux. The train I took did stop at Cité Universitaire. Not all did, though, as I found out. Only every other one, in fact. The ones that went all the way out to St. Rémy-les-Chevreuse, some thirty kilometers from the city, skipped the less important stations.

  Like Cité Universitaire. Like the train that night when Roscoe was hanging by one hand.

  The other half of the explanation—why did the Ligne de Sceaux trains drive left, when the rest of the Métro drove right?—I got from a controller who was checking tickets on the platform when I got off.

  “C’étaient les Anglais, Monsieur,” he told me.

  I had to smile, in spite of myself. Whenever there’s an anomaly in France, you can be sure the French will find somebody else to blame for it.

  I asked him what the English had had to do with it, and he was happy enough to oblige. Before it was incorporated into the Métro, the Ligne de Sceaux had been an independent railroad. Like all French railroads to this day, the trains ran on the lefthand side. After all, he said, locomotion on rails was an English invention; therefore, when the first railroads came to the continent, French capital had been unwilling to invest in them. A question of politics, he said. So it was the English who put up the money and planned and built the lines, and quite naturally they did it à I’anglaise.

  The controller talked of these events casually, like they’d happened last year. Whereas, I realized, it all went back to the middle of the nineteenth century. By that logic, you could say Roscoe Hadley had gotten his body crushed because of the Battle of Waterloo.

  “But isn’t it dangerous?” I asked the controller. “I mean, when the Mètro runs the other way?”

  “Dangerous?” he said. “But certainly! A man was killed just the other night. A black man.”

  “So I heard. Then isn’t it time you changed over?”

  “Ah, that,” he said. “That, Monsieur, is out of my hands.”

  I went by plane.

  I went alone too, pulling a Roscoe.

  The Riviera, you’ll hear, isn’t what it used to be. The air is polluted, the water too, and the prices are outrageous, and there are too many Germans. (Or English, Americans, Belgians, Dutch, pick one.) But if you hit it between seasons, when it’s too cold to swim and you can walk into the good restaurants without having reserved a week in advance, it’s still a pretty good place to get away from it all. In case of bad weather, bring along a girl. If you forget, though, chances are you’ll find one on the spot.

  That’s what I did. Her name was Janine, and I found her sitting in the Negresco bar. Sure enough, she worked for Air France when she wasn’t on vacation, and we knew some people in common.

  One thing led to another thing, and without my having planned it that way, my rest turned into a “warrior’s rest,” which is the French way of saying R-and-R. We spent the rainy days in bed, Janine and I, and parts of the bright ones too. An uncomplicated relationship, and once it happened, I figured it was just what I needed. We walked the deserted beaches, weather permitting, and toured the fortified hill towns of the back country. At night we made the casinos. A gang of elegant Kuwaitis was monopolizing the action that season. They came to play in Rollses, and clipped their cigars with cutters sprinkled with diamonds, and got clipped in turn, and felt no pain.

  Neither did I.

  Still …

  According to Janine, it wasn’t Roscoe Hadley. It was the girl, what was her name?

  “You mean Valérie?” I said.

  “Oui, celle-là.”

  “Forget about Valérie,” I told her.

  “I can, chéri,” she said. “But what about you?”

  I thought I could. Hell, I thought I had.

  By way of testing our respective theories, I even took her to a basketball game. Several of the French pro teams play on the Riviera. One of them had had its American players implicated in the scandal and its opponent’s that night had been temporarily suspended, along with all foreign pros playing in France. This at least kept the league from turning into a farce, and maybe it convinced the fans the sport really was being cleaned up.

  Anyway, the match-up we saw was held in a pretty little bandbox that would have fit into a corner of the Forum in L.A., and played that way, by home-bred Frenchies with a lot of enthusiasm and doubtful talent, the game had something quaint about it. It took me a long way back, to the late forties, when basketball still belonged to the little guys and such giants as there were were too clumsy to do more than block the lane. The tactics, this night on the Riviera, were either run-and-shoot or bob-and-weave, with a slight preference for bob-and-weave. Every so often the ball would go in to the big guy at the post. He’d either drop it or get fouled as he turned to shoot. He’d miss his fo
ul shots and then the calvary charge would start back in the other direction. If you were seeing it for the first time, it looked like fun, and not only fun but accessible. You could hear the players shouting at each other, the slap of rubber on hardwood, and I imagine some of the younger spectators in the crowd felt like putting on their sneakers and joining in. But I wasn’t seeing it for the first time, and when we got up to go, midway through the second half, we weren’t the only ones.

  The Americans would be back all right. If not Roscoe Hadley, then a bunch of black leapers who would make us fans forget Roscoe Hadley.

  Which is precisely what did happen. Though where they came from or who sent them I’ve no idea, and I never tried to find out.

  R.I.P.

  19

  The phone call came from an unexpected source. It was an officer at the American Consulate in Nice. He wanted to talk to me about an urgent, if at the same time rather delicate, matter.

  I waned to know how he’d found me.

  It was the Embassy in Paris, he said. He was only acting as messenger.

  I wanted to know how the Embassy in Paris had found me.

  That he didn’t know.

  The next morning, in any case, I went around to the Consulate, a classy joint just off the Promenade des Anglais, and met the officer in question. He turned out to be a tall, gawky Midwesterner, affable enough, with a State Department veneer and just a hint of C.I.A. He explained the situation, as he understood it. Of course he couldn’t judge the rights and wrongs, and his counterpart in Paris couldn’t either. However, his counterpart in Paris hoped that it could be worked out amicably, and soon, without the intervention of the French authorities. Otherwise it could prove most embarrassing, not only for the Embassy but for me as well.

  We put through a trunk call to his counterpart in Paris, who told me the same thing his counterpart in Nice had. He leaned on the urgency of the matter, and I agreed to an appointment that same afternoon. In Paris, my hotel.

  Maybe all I’d been waiting for was a push. Janine and I caught a midday Air Inter flight, and we landed at Orly an hour later. The sun was already low in the sky as we rode into town and it wouldn’t get much higher till spring, but the city had a cold, sharp, end-of-year beauty to it, and I could smell its tang even with the windows of the cab rolled up. I kissed Janine goodbye outside her pad in Montparnasse. She said it had been great. I promised to call her. Then I rode alone down the rue d’Assas, glomming the traffic and the shopwindows.

  I’d just gotten to my suite and was starting to thumb through the accumulated mail when the two of them came up. I never did catch the name of the man from the Embassy. The other, though, was Mr. Robert Richard Goldstein, book publisher, of New York, New York.

  As a friend of mine once said of somebody else, probably the only trouble with Bobby R. was that he wore his shirt collars too tight. Otherwise, he was nattily dressed and highly self-important. I put him well within cardiac range, and when he blew his top, which, to judge, was often, he went purple from the shirt collar up. He made a big deal about all the trouble his goddam son had caused him, but it turned out he’d come as far as London on business, and Paris is only an hour away.

  He’d brought along the Embassy man as witness. He was fed up, was Bobby R. Fed up with being fucked around by two-bit investigators. He was going to have me disbarred, locked up, deported, my license torn up in little pieces and thrown down the goddam toilet. He didn’t know how things worked in France, but it was a civilized country, he was sure they had laws on fraud and embezzlement, he was going the goddam limit with me. By the time he was finished with me, I was going to wish I’d never heard of Bob Goldstein.

  The Embassy man wore that can’t-we-settle-this-ami-cably expression of his breed, but the more Bobby R. blew, the less sure he seemed of it. Clearly, though, he’d already decided which one of us had more clout.

  As for me, I let this literary Vesuvius have his day. Then, when he was done, I said: “Why?”

  “Why what?” said Bobby R. The purple of his face had begun to break up into splotches.

  “Why do you want to do all those terrible things to me?”

  “I told you,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of being fucked around.”

  “Fucked around?” I said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Goldstein, but I don’t see it that way. Not at all. From where I see it, I’ve fulfilled my end of the bargain.”

  “You’ve what?”

  The purple came back and the cords in his neck bulged against the collar.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Look at it my way. You paid me a month’s retainer to find your son, correct? I didn’t find him in a month, so we renewed for a second month. All right, so I found him. I told you that, the last time we talked on the phone. I also told you your son didn’t want any part of you. I believe he told you the same thing himself. Maybe that’s a sign of sickness on his part, maybe it’s filial ingratitude. I wouldn’t know. But I’m not a wetnurse, and I don’t run a lock-up for wayward youth, and if that’s what you want, you’ll have to find it elsewhere.”

  “I sent you a check, you bastard! What are you trying to pull? You can’t quit now. I sent you another check!”

  “I don’t know anything about another check,” I said.

  “Do you see what I mean?” he bellowed at the Embassy man. “I told you he was a fucking crook!”

  “Now wait a minute,” I said. “Just hold everything. I’ve been out of town for a while, I haven’t even opened my mail. If you’ll just keep the lid on a second, I’ll take a look.”

  I picked up the stack and started through it again. Sure enough, there was an envelope from his publishing house in New York. I opened it. There was a letter inside, also a check. The check, it turned out, was made out for the same figures Bobby H. had laid on me that night in the kitchen. Only they had a dollar sign in front of them.

  I stuck the check into the letter, then folded the letter back ino the envelope and held it out to him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t accept this.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t accept it? You can’t back out now, it’s too late for that. A deal’s a deal!”

  “There is no deal,” I said. “I make it a rule never to work for two clients in the same family. You’ll have to go to somebody else.”

  It was cardiac time all right.

  “What was that you said?”

  “Just what I said,” I answered. “Since the last time we talked, your son’s hired me himself.”

  “For Christ’s sake! What the hell for?”

  “To keep you off his back, Mr. Goldstein.”

  Probably I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, probably there’s a law somewhere in the Napoleonic Code against inducing apoplexy in susceptible individuals. Bobby R. went through purple into a dangerous shade of blue. He was used to having his way, and to browbeating the people who worked for him till he did. But I didn’t work for him any more, and though I held no brief for Bobby H., I’d seen enough of Daddy to feel something approaching sympathy for him.

  We might have ended up in fisticuffs, or pistols at dawn, or God knows what, if there hadn’t been a knock at the door.

  “Entrez!” I called out, thinking it was the hotel staff.

  It wasn’t, though.

  I saw the expression on Bobby R.’s face change in midexpletive. I turned myself and saw them, and the surprise of it brought a grin to my face, one I couldn’t suppress entirely.

  She’d set it up all right. It had to be. The timing was too perfect. She’d set us all up.

  Resourceful bitch.

  Valérie and Bobby H. walked into my sitting room. She’d abandoned black, I noticed, for something more everyday, but the aura of chic and sexiness was still intact. Bobby H., on the other hand, was wearing one of those half-smiling, half-contrite expressions prodigal sons put on for the great reunions. I only found out the reason for it later. Apparently his dreams of free and glorious enterprise had gone
up like so much hash. The Dutch connection had broken down; a couple of his “distributors” had been picked up by the Law. Another day and Bobby H. might have found himself where even Daddy would have had trouble helping him.

  “Keep it, Cage,” said Valérie.

  “Keep what?”

  “There’s a check in that envelope, isn’t there? Keep it. We earned it.”

  I noticed the we.

  I looked at the envelope, then at the publisher, but he only had eyes for the product of his masculinity. The Embassy man had crossed his legs and was making a show of examining his fingernails.

  “Come on, Cage,” said Valérie, taking the envelope from my hand. “We’ve got things to do.”

  She stuck the envelope in my pocket, took my arm, and we left them. I don’t think they noticed.

  We walked toward where I’d left the Giulia a few short centuries ago. The streetlights were already on. The windshield of the Giulia was plastered over with parking tickets, and it was only an act of God that they hadn’t towed it away.

  “You set it all up, didn’t you?” I said. “Including the meeting upstairs?”

  “I thought you’d been gone long enough,” was all she answered.

  I started to ask her how she’d found me, but I knew what her response would be: secrets of the profession.

  “Well,” I said, “it looks like I’m in your hands. What happens now?”

  “Have you forgotten? That day on the road? You called it a beautiful idea.”

  “No, I haven’t forgotten. But there were two beautiful ideas.”

  “But only one of them mattered,” she said.

  I remembered all right. I kissed her for openers, next to the Giulia. I could feel the grin spreading again inside me, and it met no obstacles.

  Only then it did.

  I was feeling around in my pockets.

  “Shit,” I said. “The car keys. I must have left them upstairs.”

  I turned to go back, but she held on to me.

  “Wait a minute, Cage,” she said.