The Stiff Upper Lip Read online

  I told him.

  “The cheap mother,” he said. He repeated the figure, sneered at it. “I’ll tell you what, Mr. … Excuse me, what did you say your name was?”

  “Cage,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you what, Cage,” he said, grinning at me suddenly. “What would you do if I doubled it?”

  “And paid me in what?” I asked. “Brown sugar?”

  “Brown sugar” is what they call the happy dust they’re peddling these days on the street corners of Europe.

  “Like whatever you want,” said Bobby H. coolly.

  I thought about it, but not for very long.

  “One client per family,” I said, picking the receiver off the hook.

  “Put it down, Cage,” Valérie said.

  “Oui, Monsieur?” the hotel operator was saying.

  “I want to call overseas, to the U.S.A. The number’s …”

  “I said put the phone down, Cage. Now!”

  For the past minute or so, I’d let Valérie out of my sight. I’d made the same kind of mistake before. Now I turned toward her. God knows what else she carried in the black tote, but now she had a miniature and snub-nosed popgun in her hand. It was pointed at me. It didn’t look very serious. On the other hand, she did.

  I glanced at Bobby H. He didn’t seem to know any more about what was going on than I did.

  “Of all the goddam things,” I said, or some such immortal remark.

  “J’écoute, Monsieur,” said the hotel operator in my ear.

  “Never mind,” I told her, “I’ll call back later,” and hung up the phone.

  I sat there a minute. Nobody moved. Then I stood up.

  “All right,” I said to Valérie, “suppose you put away the popgun and tell us what the hell this is all about.”

  “I’m good with popguns,” she said to me levelly. “You take another step and I’ll have to put a hole through your kneecap. Now stand where you are. You, Bobby,” she ordered, not taking her eyes off me. “Search him.”

  “But I thought …”

  “I said search him!”

  Bobby H. came up behind me and went through my pockets, tossing the items he found on the couch. If I’d had a switchblade hidden in my rectum he wouldn’t have found it, but otherwise he did a pretty creditable job.

  Anyway, I don’t own a switchblade.

  “No weapons,” he said when he was done. “Not much of anything, you know?”

  “Bring me his wallet.”

  This was getting to be a habit. Bobby H. took my wallet over to her. She went through it, leaving everything but the cash. This she held out in a wad to him.

  “Here, take it,” she said. “Count it.”

  He did. It came to a little over a thousand francs.

  “Take it if you want,” she said. “It’ll pay for your time.”

  “But I thought …”

  “I said take it,” she repeated peremptorily. “Then split. I’ll hold him here for half an hour. Then you’re on your own.”

  He stuffed the money into a jeans pocket.

  “But listen, Val, don’t you want me to …”

  “Half an hour,” she repeated. “Don’t ask questions. I’ll explain it later. Just split!”

  And so he split, did Bobby H.

  She waited, listening, until the elevator door opened and shut in the hallway. Then she walked slowly across the space between us, stopping a step in front of me.

  The popgun was still pointed at my chest, but I saw the vertical creases on either side of her mouth.

  “How am I doing,” she said softly.

  “Not bad for a beginner,” I said, but …”

  She closed the remaining space between us. The popgun lowered as she came, and then I couldn’t see it any more. She put her arms around my neck. She went up on tiptoe, her body climbing up mine, and she kissed me slowly, tonguing, like time had gone out of style.

  Not bad for a beginner.

  Later on, I asked her how she’d found Bobby H. This brought out the even white teeth as well as the vertical dimples, and the skin crinkled seductively around her eyes.

  “Secrets of the profession,” she said.

  “Touché,” I said. “But why bring him up here if you were going to let him go?”

  “I didn’t know that ahead of time. It only occurred to me once we were here.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “You both did.”

  I didn’t get it. She didn’t strike me as the typè to have gone soft on Bobby H.

  “Didn’t he offer you double what his father had?” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “And you turned him down. Were you just being moral? Or was it that the price wasn’t high enough? Supposing, though, that we let him go and the double became triple. Or more.”

  “What makes you think that? What makes you think he won’t just disappear again.”

  “He can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, he’s making too much money.”

  I’d been right about that, as it turned out. Bobby H. was aptly named, even if the sugar trade wasn’t really his action.

  “That’s for one thing,” I said. “What else?”

  “Well, for another,” she said, smiling up at me, “he thinks he’s in love with me.”

  But later still she said: “Now let’s talk terms.”

  She was sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette, the sheet pulled up to her waist and the sweat drying on her breasts.

  “What terms?” I said, stoking my pipe.

  “The terms of my employment. We agreed that if I delivered Bobby to you, you’d hire me.”

  “I agreed to no such thing. Besides, I seem to remember that you undelivered him.”

  She eyed me sexily.

  “Oh, come on, Cage, stop being so tough and intractable and hard to get.”

  I eyed her in return, not to be tough and intractable, but because something had just struck me, call it an insight, and I was looking for corroboration.

  “Look,” I said. “You’ve put on quite a show. The best. But you can’t tell me you went to all that trouble just to get a job.”

  She sighed.

  I lit a match, lit the pipe, shook the match out.

  “How did you guess?” she said quietly.

  “Secrets of the profession,” I replied. “But maybe you’d better tell me the rest of it.”

  “O.K.,” she said, her eyes holding mine. “The rest of it is that I want you to keep someone I know from getting killed.”

  2

  I’m trying to think of an American equivalent. It was a little like running into a skirt in Los Angeles who was freaked out on bicycle racing. And not Tour de France bicycle racing either. More like the Tour de Rhode Island. Imagine, if you can, a red-blooded, liberated American female who couldn’t tell Kareem Abdul Jabbar from Doctor J. but could rattle off the first ten finishers in last summer’s Tour de Rhode Island.

  It was a little like that.

  I bet you didn’t even know they played le basket in France, much less in a pro league. That’s right, I’m talking about the round-ball game on the hardwood floor, the one where you try to throw the ball through a hoop without stepping on anybody’s knuckles. Up to a few years ago, not many Frenchmen knew more about it than that, and the guys who played it were bakers and paperhangers by trade, and drove their own cars to bandbox gyms, and passed the hat at half time. To give you an idea, the socalled “Champion of France,” year-in year-out, was Villeurbanne, and the closest the game ever got to Paris was the working-class suburb of Bagnolet.

  Don’t ask me where Villeurbanne is.

  But Valérie sure could tell you.

  Anyway, times have changed in le basket français. They’ve got hot water in the showers now, and the teams travel by train and plane, and the pay can go as high as 10,000 francs a month, which is 2,000 U.S. greenbacks, plus bonuses if you make the European play-offs. There’s ev
en a vocabulary to go with it, like lancer-franc for free throw and le smash for slam-dunk, and the sports pages print the standings, and on the odd weekend afternoon, when there’s nothing else going on, you can even catch a game on the tube. And all this because, a few years ago, some far-sighted promoter got the idea of opening the French game to foreigners. Right now the limit is two to a club, plus however many can get themselves naturalized, and I’ll give you one guess where they come from and what color they are.

  Turn it around the other way.

  Say you’re a kinky-haired black kid growing up in the slums of L.A. As long as you can remember, you’ve had a basketball in your hands, and you could dribble behind your back before you could spell your name. You played junior-high ball and playground ball and you made All-City in high school and they even paid you to go play in college. All along people have been telling you the round ball is your ticket out, look at Wilt, man, look at Jabbar, look at Sy Wicks and Curtis Rowe. Hey, look at them. Only it hasn’t panned out that way for you. Maybe your college club doesn’t make the tournaments. Or the night the scouts come to look you over, you shoot one for eleven. Or maybe it’s simple statistics. Like there are how many thousands playing college ball in America? And how many make the pro league? A couple of hundred, no more.

  So you’ve been had, right? Right in the American Dream, Spade Department. Well, you aren’t the first one.

  Only then, one day, the Man comes to talk. You’ve never seen him before, but he’s the Man all right, even though he talks with a crazy acccent. He’s seen you play, and he likes what he’s seen. He even has a plane ticket for you, made out in your name, one way to Paris, France, and a cash bonus if you use it. Shit, man, Pa-ree! So you’re not pulling down two thou a month, more like a hundred bucks a game plus expenses, and so the Man never told you nobody’d speak your language, not even the coach, and that the French red wine’d give you the runs worse than Thunderbird. But since when did they have to pay you to play ball? And don’t it beat unemployment?

  Roscoe Hadley, though, didn’t get to France that way.

  The way Roscoe Hadley told it, he was mooching down the street one day on the outskirts of Paris, minding his mutton chops, when he heard this noise coming from a building. A funny thump-thump noise, and familiar, kind of. He walked in. Sure enough, it was a gym. A bunch of French cats were shooting baskets, in this gym, on the outskirts of Paris. And Roscoe’s palms started to itch. He took off his jacket. He took off his shoes so as not to mark the floor. He picked up a loose ball, palmed it. Then he showed them a trick or two, like Roscoe’s finger-roll. Then they did a little one-on-one; then two-on-one; then three-on-one; then the whole shebang trying to take the ball away from Roscoe.

  And what happened then?

  “Well,” said Roscoe Hadley, “What happ’n then just happ’n, man. Natchr’l. It was workin’ the kinks out. That an’ finding me a pair o’ shooze.”

  At that, his version was probably pretty accurate. Allowing for an omission or two.

  Between that day in the gym and the night, almost a year later, when we drove down to see him play, there’d been a lot of changes. And hot only for Roscoe. The French pro league, you see, has a First Division of sixteen teams. At the end of each season, the bottom three teams in the standings drop into the Second Division and the top three from the Second move up. When Roscoe started playing for his club, they were somewhere in the middle of Second Division limbo; by the summer, they were on their way up to basketball heaven. Then, over the summer break, the club owner got carried away. First he moved the team from the Paris suburbs to a so-called “new city” some forty kilometers south on the autoroute. Then he hired his second foreigner, a balding black rebounder from Oakland, by way of Barcelona and Milan, called Odessa Grimes.

  Or “Greemse,” in French.

  Oh yes, and in the meantime Roscoe Hadley had met Valérie. And fallen in love.

  The night we saw him play, we missed the first ten minutes trying to find the joint. Valérie had been there before, but it wasn’t hard to get lost. The autoroute off-ramp took us onto a loop which circled the new city, but whenever we followed the “Palais des Sports” signs off the loop, a forest of skyscraper dormitories closed in on us, and the only way out of the forest was back onto the loop. Finally we parked and hiked our way in through a futuristic shopping-mall labyrinth. It was the sound that guided us the last kilometer, a steady two-syllable chant that went “AD-LAY AD-LAY AD-LAY AD-LAY” and meant, allowing for the French inability to handle the English H, that Roscoe Hadley was doing his thing.

  That “Palais des Sports,” stuck in the middle of a shopping center some forty kilometers from Paris, was a little concrete-domed gem of an arena, with a seating capacity of some 5,000 including laps, and it was full to bursting. Maybe le basket hasn’t caught on yet in the capital, but out there in the boondocks of the twenty-first century, where the only competition for the entertainment franc is the tube, Roscoe’s show had them stomping in the aisles.

  And pretty exciting stuff, if you didn’t know any better. Even if you did. The game itself was really two games, one involving four black American giants and the other half a dozen sawed-off Frenchmen who, to judge from the rare moments they touched it, still thought a round ball was something you dribbled with your feet. The match-ups in the two-on-two, though, were pretty unequal, and not only because of Roscoe Hadley. Odessa Grimes was a monumental slab of glistening black granite who looked like he should have been holding up a building instead of two-stepping around a basketball court. He was the kind of player you never notice much until the other team misses a shot, which in this case was often. Call it intimidation, and Odessa Grimes knew how to intimidate. Because whenever the ball came off the hoop, up would go Odessa, bald head and all, crashing the boards like he was going to eat them, the rim and the net too, plus anything that got in his way, man or beast. And down, the ball in his paws, and up, with a flick of the wrists, to fling it out to mid-court, where Roscoe was already breezing in high. A couple of dribbles later, Roscoe would hit the foul line, and then he’d take off. A feint, a twist, a head fake or two—all in mid-air—and then he’d be floating at the hoop, hairdo and all, and it was two more points and “AD-LAY AD-LAY AD-LAY.”

  Only the referees kept the rout from becoming a stampede. They were French, of course; so was Descartes. According to Descartes’ way of looking at reality, anything that goes up has got to come down, meaning that there was no way you could do what Roscoe did without cheating. Descartes, I guess, never heard of Elgin Baylor and body control, and neither had the French referees. So they called Roscoe for traveling even though his feet never touched the floor, and for charging, goal-tending, grab-assing, and assorted other infractions they thought up on the spot, and the crowd threatened mayhem, which turned into a standing ovation when Roscoe came out with four fouls and a twenty-point lead shortly before half time, followed by another standing ovation when the lead dwindled in the second half and he had to come back on, and when he quit for good, with forty-two points and leaving Odessa Grimes to mop up, you’d have sworn you were in the L.A. Forum and that Baylor, West, and Co. had just put away the Knicks in the seventh game of the finals.

  “Just like the good old days,” I said.

  “That’s the trouble,” said Valérie, biting her nails.

  They came out of the arena together, four jolly black giants in blazers and gray flannels. They’d driven down from Paris together, and apparently they did pretty much everything together when the schedules allowed, along with the other brothers who played the European circuits. They came clowning and hotdogging through an admiring crowd like all four of them had won the game. Until, that is, they saw us waiting for them. Then the grins wiped off their faces like erasers sweeping a blackboard. This wasn’t because of Valérie. They could tolerate a white French chick. But I, to judge, was a real conversation-stopper.

  Valérie introduced me around. Nobody shook my hand, though, and when Rosc
oe allowed as how he was going with us, he had to go palaver with them, and it took the whole tribal bit, complete with palm slaps and hey-babies, to keep them from coming along to chaperone him.

  As is, we had enough trouble fitting him in. I still drive the Giulia, which is a normal-sized car for normal-sized people, but not for somebody who goes six-seven without his afro and whose hands hang down to around his knees. We tried him out in front, but there was no way, and finally we had to settle for the bottom half of him in the back and the rest draped forward between the bucket seats.

  Don’t get me wrong, six-seven isn’t that abnormal a height and I don’t want to make him out a freak. But you couldn’t help think it when you saw him off the court: the arms which had no place to go but down, the watermelon hands, the long, flapping feet. He kept his eyes on his feet when he walked, like they’d go off without him if he didn’t, and his body motion was all herky-jerk like his bones were attached to wires. All in all, he reminded me of one of those water birds, the ones that are all line and beauty when you see them flying but look fairly ridiculous flapping around on dry land. The more so in Ivy League blazer and flannels.

  Once we got back to Paris, we took him to the Coupole on the Boulevard Montparnasse. They’re open till the wee hours, and they serve a mean côte de boeuf, which is a beef chop for two. Roscoe had one all by himself, along with a platter of French fries, this on top of a double portion of herring in cream and a mushoom omelette, and underneath a hot-fudge sundae with toasted almonds. He ate slowly, steadily, taking his time, but all during the meal, and after, when we talked over coffee and brandy, his eyes took in the vast room and the people sitting at the tables and standing up to go and coming in the doors and going out. His hoods were down and his gaze cool, but he was looking just the same, and I don’t think he’d have taken kindly to people coming up behind him.

  “Ma-a-an,” he said, chuckling, when he’d finished off the sundae, “one thing I sure don’t miss about the U.S. of A. is the food. You don’t have a see-gar by any chance?”

  We ordered him a cigar. He rolled it between his fingers, smelled it, then rolled it between his lips, then lit it and puffed. I almost hated to interrupt his pleasure.