The French Kiss Read online

  The phone rang.

  Helen Raven had the receiver in her hand before the first ring ended. It was A1 Dove, the courtierhimself. Or—just maybe—the ex-courtier, to judge from the look on her face when she asked him about the painting.

  Apparently she didn’t like what she heard. There was a long pause. Then she said: “I see … yes, that’s right, we’ll make them pay for it.” And then she looked at me.

  She told him I was there. Apparently this created a considerable problem. There was another longer pause, punctuated only by her yeses and nos. Yes she’d been stupid, Helen Raven agreed, while she stared at me in that same sullen expressionless way that went along with her face, like the scars. Then finally, level-eyed and extending the receiver toward me:

  “He wants to talk to you.”

  I stood up. Suddenly I felt tired beyond the hour. I was going back a ways mentally, in space and time, to the guy in fatigues and grinning under his crewcut, and back beyond that and forward to a lot of flickering images I’d long since stopped looking at.

  “Is that you, Cagey?” his voice said.

  “That’s right, Al. And it’s late and I’m tired. I think it’s time you told your friends to stop fucking with me.”

  “Me tell my friends!” He laughed into the phone. That familiar licorice sound. “If anybody should be doing that, it’s you, baby. Only I think it’s a little late in the day.”

  “You’ve got it wrong, Al. Whoever’s trying to stick it into you, I’ve got no part in it.” Which was pretty close to the truth. “And anyway I don’t see what I could do that’d hurt you now.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Like if I let you go, how long would you keep your mouth shut? Would you give me twenty-four hours? Cross your heart and hope to die?”

  “Keep my mouth shut about what, Al?”

  “Keep your mouth shut about what,” he repeated. “Tell me, how much will twenty-four hours cost me? That’s right in your line, Cagey, name your price. You’ve got a going rate, don’t you? Hey, how about Binty? Remember Binty? Suppose I threw Binty in, would you give me a discount? Just for old time’s sake?”

  There was more to it than that, but I let him run it into the ground without answering. Somewhere along the way he started to laugh again. Maybe it was nerves, high-roller’s nerves. Or something else. But what he was saying left me in no mood for analysis.

  “Are you still there, Cagey?” His voice low.

  “Yeah, I’m still here.”

  “You never do forget, do you.” This needed no answer either. “Well, only this time, ole buddy, you’re the one who’s in deep.”

  “It doesn’t look like I’m alone, Al.”

  “That’s right,” almost in a whisper, “and too bad I don’t have you to help me this time. But I’m not in over my head yet. And you are. You are, Cagey. You chose the wrong side. If I was in my right mind, it’d be finished for you, ole buddy, all she wrote. But I owe you one. I don’t forget either, baby. I’m going to pay you back, and then we’ll be quits.”

  I started to say something, but the line had gone dead. I guess that was the signal they’d worked out.

  I saw the brother stand, the cannon reversed in his paw.

  Rillington and Helen Raven were standing too.

  At times like that, friend, you’ve got two choices. Either you take it like a lamb, Auschwitz-style, or you give it the old college try. It’s mostly a question of style, because either way the end result’s the same.

  I swung away from the phone and dove for him, driving low for his legs. I got there too, all the way in. Not that it mattered. Because meanwhile Black Thor had come thundering out of the spotlit heavens again, and there was a terrific crashing, like the old Kenton brass giving it the Grand Finale inside my skull. My muscles turned the consistency of doughnuts, and when he shrugged his knees I slipped off the deep end, out past the stars and the crashing, to where there’s no music at all.

  THREE

  Let’s leave the body lay there. It won’t wake up for a while, not even in what must have been a pretty considerable commotion.

  I guess it stood to reason. Like when people asked me what I was doing in Paris, I used to say: “Call it a cross between early retirement and extended amnesia.”

  Actually a pair of numbers from Air France had been responsible for it. Solange and Brigitte were their names, and it was they, a few centuries back, who’d introduced the partouze to my corner of Southern California, along with other French exports like goat cheese and Cahors wine and, on special occasions, some of the best dope Marseille had to offer. The partouze, in case you don’t know it, is a venerable French pastime. All it takes is cars and couples and a quiet place where x number of same can park undisturbed. It’s like musical chairs, only nobody loses, and so popular in France that partouzes have been known to create traffic jams in the Bois de Boulogne at three in the morning. Anyway, we used to hold them out my way in Santa Monica, and then when the sun came up on the surf we’d run the girls back down the freeway to where the 747’s dip in low out of the smog like big pregnant birds and off they’d go, half-stoned, into all that wild blue yonder us groundlings never saw, and leaving old homebody Cage to count his doubloons by the hearth.

  Of the doubloons, I should say, there were sufficient at the time. My card says B. F. Cage, Public Relations, but the way I worked it, this meant mostly the gathering and suppression of information. Other people’s dirty laundry in sum, and there was enough of it in Mansonland to keep a man of relatively simple tastes in Heinekens till the last of the 747’s came home to roost. But then something came along which made further toil and sweat superfluous. It was very sweet and dirty and I’ve told the ins and outs of it elsewhere, but suffice it that I hit a bonanza, a bona fide Bell Fruit jackpot. With the result that when the girls ganged up on me on one of those crazy rides down to the airport, there was literally nothing to hold me back. Solange, I remember, was whispering sweet nothings about life in Paris while Brigitte kept her hand on the throttle even after I’d turned off the motor, and the movie on the flight was Elliott Gould in The Long Goodby.

  I set up shop in the bridal suite of a small hotel off St. Germain-des-Prés, but as much of my time was spent in a picturesque little pad up near the Observatory in Montparnasse. Whenever Solange and Brigitte took off on the Tahiti run, Josiane and Sabine flew in from Anchorage with a suitcaseful of king crabs. The weeks turned into months, the months into centuries. The loving was mutual, sometimes communal, and I never looked back. For all I knew the biddy at my old answering service was still taking messages and the Mustang still tethered in the parking lot at L.A. International, racking up $5 a day for the concessionaires.

  End of idyll, one slick wet night when I came back to the hotel to find a bulky florid-faced gent waiting for me in the bar. His name was Bernard Lascault, he had the afternoon Le Monde spread out in front of him, and he seemed impressed by the fact that he’d gone to so much trouble to seek me out. The name meant nothing to me, though the organization of which he was Président-Directeur Général did vaguely. It was called Arts Mondiaux. He pronounced organization with the British eye, and his accent was as impeccably Savile Row as his clothes, and when I told him I wasn’t in the market to buy paintings, he laughed at the back of his nose the way they used to before the Empire went under. But his way of getting to the point was strictly Latin.

  A half-hour and a couple of Glenfiddiches later, I was still waiting for him to get to it. In the meantime I’d been served up a pretty heavy lecture about the international art trade. The gist of it was that the market had been going up and down like a yo-yo. New money had come in, new sources had opened up, and the pros had lost control. The big curators and collectors of Europe and America had been pushed aside by total strangers, and I suppose it didn’t help any that some of the total strangers paid in yen while others faced Mecca in the morning before they brushed their teeth. There were sudden trend
s and even suddener flops, and posturers and simpletons on both sides of the checkbook. As a result, some works of art were traded at unthinkable prices, but a lot more had been quietly withdrawn from sale. Some of the long-established galleries were even in serious financial difficulty.

  “Don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Cage,” said Bernard Lascault, “none of this has yet to have a direct effect on my organ-eye-zation. In point of fact I believe that a certain shaking-out process would be a very beneficial, a healthy, a necessary thing. Besides Art—real Art, good Art—remains one of the soundest placements an astute investor can make, the more so in precarious times.”

  Well, glad as I might have been to hear it, I still didn’t see what it had to do with me. And I was on the verge of saying so again when he changed the subject.

  “Tell me if I may be so bold,” he said, gesturing at my pipe, “what’s that tobacco you’re smoking? It has an unusual aroma, very pleasant.”

  “It’s Erinmore,” I answered. “Murray’s Erinmore Flake.”

  “Odd name.”

  “It’s Irish.”

  “Irish? You’re not Irish in origin by any chance?”

  “No,” I said, “but I like their tobacco.”

  “And the Scottish, I notice, for their whiskey?”

  I nodded.

  “And us French …? For our women?”

  If this lit a small warning in my brain, I paid it no attention. He stared blandly across at me, between heavy lids that looked like they were standing guard over his eyes. Then he said:

  “Tell me, Mr. Cage, what do you know about a certain Alain Dove?”

  I did a double take over the way he pronounced the name, then a triple take and a lot of other takes besides. He was a lot cuter than I’d given him credit for.

  “I used to know an Al Dove,” I said, “if we’re talking about the same person.”

  “I think we are,” Bernard Lascault answered mildly.

  “I haven’t seen him in years. The last I heard of him he was up to his neck in a California real-estate mess. You could look it up, it made the headlines.”

  “Yes. It was called Rancho del Cielo, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And before that? There was some sort of obscure affair concerning drugs in which you yourself were somehow involved, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “An obscure affair,” I agreed. Maybe it was around in there that my palms began to sweat, just a little.

  “There was a woman involved in it too, wasn’t there? Who later became Mrs. Dove?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yes. Well then, suppose I were to tell you your friend has since become … how shall I say? … one of the hottest dealers in the field of international art?”

  I thought it over.

  “Well,” I said, “you yourself talked about posturers and simpletons …”

  He laughed heartily at that, all the way down to his epiglottis.

  “Posturer perhaps. But simpleton? I’d hardly think so.”

  According to Bernard Lascault, Al Dove was primarily a dealer’s dealer. In French they called that a courtier. He’d hit the market like a thunderstorm a few years back, and the new American boom in Europe had been largely his doing. All the established galleries had dealt with him, Arts Mondiaux included, and if there’d been one or two “disquieting” incidents, nobody had asked too many questions. But conditions had changed, the market had gone soft, and Al Dove lacked control. At least that was how Bernard Lascault put it. The way I interpreted it, in a seller’s market anything went, including your Great-Aunt Minnie’s childhood etchings, but when the buyers started staying home, then people began to worry about finer points, like maybe stolen goods.

  “His ambition, one might say,” Bernard Lascault went on, “has got the better of him. Now were the problem limited to him, one might say: too bad and … what is it? … good riddance to bad rubbish? But of course it isn’t. Mr. Dove’s problem is ours. In point of fact, his lack of control is jeopardizing us all.”

  “Why don’t you tell him so?” I asked.

  “Ah, but we’ve tried. Of course we’ve tried.”

  “And?”

  “We have an expression: le vent en poupe, how do you say it in English? The wind in the … sails? Sometimes it is very difficult to convince people who have the wind in the sails.”

  That sounded like Al Dove all right, the same one I’d known.

  “And what about the Law?”

  “Do you mean the police?” He grimaced at the idea. “No. Of course the police have their purposes, but that would be premature. Quite premature. Besides, I’m not sure it could be proven that Mr. Dove has done anything illegal, even if one wanted to.”

  “I see,” I said. “And, to quote you another expression, you also don’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

  “The goose …? Oh yes, quite.”

  “And so you’ve come to me?” He nodded. “Well, flattering as that might be, Mr. Lascault, what makes you think I’d be able to convince him where you haven’t? I mean, I suppose I could rough him up for you a little, but …”

  He started to shake his head, then settled for that condescending nasal laugh.

  “Ah, you Americans!” he said. “You always see life in such primary colors! But Paris isn’t Chicago, Mr. Cage. The situation is rather more delicate. All we really want right now is information.”

  “What sort of information?”

  He leaned forward heavily in his chair.

  “Information as to his sources. Who is backing him. Where the works he offers really come from, what his financial relationships are. Of course some of this is known to us already, but not all. For example, we know that the greater part of his business is carried on with a well-respected gallery in Beverly Hills, California, the current president of which is … Alain Dove. If you see what I mean.”

  I saw what he meant, only not as far as I should have. After all, if Arts Mondiaux was, as he put it, such a farflung organ-eye-zation, with branches in L.A. and San Francisco among other places, then why …? But my mind must have been on other things. Like how it isn’t every day you get to look up an old buddy. And get paid for the privilege.

  “So you’re suggesting what?” I asked. “That I look him up, say just for old times’ sakes? And start asking questions? And that—just for old times’ sakes—Al Dove’s going to let me in on his trade secrets?”

  He shrugged, and smoothed his thinning hair with his hand.

  “Stranger things have happened,” he said imperturbably. “Mr. Dove can be a very free-speaking person. We also understand that you are a very resourceful one.”

  “Who told you that, Mr. Lascault?”

  “As I’ve said,” he replied mildly, “we’ve quite good sources. In California as well as Paris.”

  “And what else have they said about me?”

  “That you’re good at your work, tough and good. Also that your past relationship to the man in question has been, shall we say … equivocal? Also that once you commit yourself, you’re to be trusted … up to a point.”

  It was nice to know that my reputation was still intact.

  “Up to a point?” I said.

  By way of answer, he reached into his suit jacket and pulled out his checkbook.

  The parenthesis about Helen Raven came later, by telephone, and the invitation to Al Dove’s party by messenger. Who was Helen Raven? I wanted to know. An art critic, he said, of a certain minor reputation. Also a professor somewhere on the West Coast. But what interested him was the precise nature of her relationship with Al Dove.

  Somebody ought to have warned me, though, about large men with small laughs. A clever operator, Monsieur Bernard Lascault. He had help from his checkbook too, but when you’re handing out the gold stars, don’t forget that across from him was a stud whose palms went sweaty, just a little, at the mention of certain names, and the memory of old, unsettled scores not all the stews and pa
rtouzes and other sweet diversions of Paris, France, had quite managed to bury.

  Rusty, like I said.

  FOUR

  The pain started right behind my eyeballs. It stayed there pretty much as long as I didn’t move, but I was being dragged up toward the light like a hooked fish, and the brighter it got, the more the pain scorched my nerves. The insides of my eyelids went from purple to orange to a searing white and the empty space between my ears started to smoke like dry ice. Somewhere near the light I wrenched and lurched, and there was a blinding, tearing sensation when the hook pulled loose, and after that I must have drifted off for a while, down toward the cool swooning depths where the ones that get away swap stories in their old age.

  Until it started getting lighter again.

  Somebody groaned. That was me. I was looking at sky. The sky was a bright and sickish gray, and only a thin, slanting shield separated me from it.

  I blinked. It hurt to blink. Something moved between me and the light, then away again. That hurt too, and I tried to lift my head up to tell whoever it was to cut out the movement.

  Instead I threw up.

  Whoever it was leaned over me, registering the event like an ichthyologist in an aquarium. Around in there, in no particular sequence, I realized that I had no sensation below my elbows or my knees, that the rest of me was sweating and shivering at once, also that the thin shield was the slanting skylight of the studio, only a lot closer than the last time I’d seen it.

  After a while the ichthyologist hunkered down near me. He was a little guy with a wizened turtle’s head, and he wrinkled his nose in distaste like he’d never seen one like me before. We stared at each other. He started asking me questions in a flat, functional language. After a while I realized it was French.

  He had small, impervious eyes. Patient eyes. He wanted to know how I’d gotten there. I wanted to tell him too, but the nausea kept getting in the way. It came and went in clammy gusts, hot and cold. Not only had I been thorred but trussed and shot full of puke and thrown up on the loggia for good measure. I was spread-eagled on a mattress and left to bake under the skylight and Bernard Lascault was telling me Paris wasn’t Chicago and Al Dove was paying his debts.