The French Kiss Read online

  “Who was that?” I said once she’d hung up.

  She kept her hand clasped to the receiver. The backs of her knuckles had turned white.

  “Madame Lasc …” she started, then jerking her head furiously in my direction: “That’s none of your business!”

  “What’s the trouble?” I asked mildly. “Things aren’t so hot at home?”

  Her lips tightened. She started to retort, but her emotions caught her before a word got out. Then suddenly her whole face seemed to disintegrate. She blubbered. She stared out at me through squinting eyes, knowing it wasn’t a pretty sight but helpless to do anything about it.

  I reached for a handkerchief, but waving me off with her head, she opened a desk drawer and pulled a handful of Kleenexes from a box. With one wad she blew her nose, hard, then wiped at her eyes with another.

  The storm blew past.

  “I’m sorry, Monsieur,” she said. “I …” She hiccuped, then mastered her hiccups. “I can do nothing more for you. I have your card. If you’ll give me your address and number, I’ll tell Monsieur Lascault you were here.”

  She reached out, but you’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to beat me to the draw. While her hand was still in mid-air, I had the check folded in mine and halfway into my pocket.

  “Never mind,” I told her, patting her knuckles. “He knows where to find me.”

  As it was, she’d given me something to go on. Not a lot maybe, but you learn to make do. And more, as it turned out, than I’d bargained for.

  The principal actors in the situation had all gone to ground. Before picking up the Giulia that morning I’d made a run past the studio. The downstairs door had been wide open, but there wasn’t a sign of life on any of the landings. The studio itself was locked. I got the door open with my trusty hairpin and walked in. The only thing missing from when I’d last seen it, as far as I could remember, was William Rillington’s work-in-progress. The Law, I figured, had gone in for art collecting.

  Now, after leaving Arts Mondiaux, I drove back into Paris and over to Al Dove’s. A gendarme was standing duty downstairs under the glass canopy, a real one this time.

  He unfolded from the wall as I approached and blocked the entrance. At the same time he touched two fingers to the bill of his kepi.

  “Stand aside, my fine fellow,” I said. “I’ve an appointment with Alan Dove.”

  “No one’s allowed in, Monsieur.”

  “Not allowed in? What do you mean, ‘no one’s allowed in?’ I’ve got an appointment.”

  “Monsieur Dove’s not here, Monsieur.”

  “Not here?” I glanced impatiently at my watch. “Well? Where is he? This is absurd! I’ll have you know I’ve got an appointment to see his collection!”

  The gendarme shrugged, but he stood his ground. I tried to maneuver around him but his body cut down the angle. We bumped.

  “No one’s allowed in without special authorization, Monsieur.”

  “Special authorization? But this is an outrage! I don’t need special authorization, my good man, don’t you know who you’re talking to?” He didn’t seem to at that. “Well? Where do I have to go to get this special authorization?”

  “To the police, Monsieur.”

  “The police? But you’re the police, aren’t you? Say, but nothing’s happened to him, has it? What’s happened to him? I demand to know what’s happened to Alan Dove!”

  “No one knows what’s happened to him, Monsieur.”

  “No one knows? But that’s an outrage! I demand to see the person in charge!”

  I maneuvered again. We bumped again.

  “I’m sorry, Monsieur,” he said, nodding toward the sky. “There’s no one up there who knows any more than I do.”

  “Who’s up there?”

  “Just some of my colleagues, Monsieur. And the paintings.”

  I could have tried the old BF Special on him, the fullback up the middle without the ball while I snuck around end for the winning touchdown, but I figured he’d bring up the cornerbacks if I did. Instead I went off, muttering “outrage” and “special authorization” till I was out of earshot, and when I took a last look back from the porte-cochère, he was slouched against the entrance again, staring at nothing.

  So Al Dove had disappeared, it seemed, along with his team, and the Law had his collection, and from what Freddy Schwartz had told me plus what I’d picked up on my own, I had one or two pretty good theories as to why. But Bernard Lascault was lying low too, which didn’t square either with the theories or with the Law having “closed” the dossier.

  As it happened, I’d called Freddy Schwartz right after my first meeting with Lascault. Freddy’s a sad and bleary-eyed old rummy who’d lost his job on the L.A. Times mostly because of the booze. But like I said, he’s still a useful little guy, even though when he’d called me back that morning, it had been midnight in Los Angeles and to judge from the rolling sound of his voice he’d been well on his way to bottle heaven.

  According to Freddy Schwartz, the gallery in Beverly Hills was a real go-go operation but strictly kosher. Al Dove was listed as president, but the person who ran the show on the spot was Mrs. Al Dove. “You used to know her, didn’t you, Cagey?” Freddy Schwartz had asked, and when I didn’t answer: “Back when she was Binty Banks? Weren’t you and she something of a number once?”

  “I used to know her,” I’d said finally. “But who’s behind it?”

  “I’m just coming to that. All it cost you was a trip to the Hall of Records. Al and Binty Dove are the listed officers, but you’ll never guess who owns the property.”

  “Who owns the property, Freddy?”

  “Does the Rancho del Cielo Corporation ring a bell?”

  It did, and a hell of an obvious one. Rancho del Cielo was the real estate swindle Al Dove had been involved in a few years back. It had been one of those desert retirement paradises which pop up like cholla cactus all over Southern California, with golf course and clubhouse and door-to-door morticians, so much down and the rest in your will. Only the pine they’d built Rancho del Cielo out of was so green you could hear the sap hissing and the financing had turned out to be as creaky as the suckers who’d bought in. And Al Dove and his partners had gotten out two steps ahead of the scandal and about half a step ahead of the Law.

  Freddy Schwartz named the partners from memory. Most of them I recognized. Put together they spelled mob. This was nothing new for Al Dove, but the art connection sure was for the mob. I asked Freddy about it.

  “I’ve had trouble pinning it down, Cagey. It seems there’s quite a traffic in stolen pictures, a booming one I understand, but a lot of it works through the insurance outfits. I mean, they rip off a big collector and then they try to deal with the insurance boys. And the insurance boys cough up mostly. I did some digging for you down at the paper, there’re some photocopies already in the mail to you. But nobody connects the gallery to it.”

  “‘A lot of it,’ you said. But what about the stuff that doesn’t go back through the insurance companies?”

  “I’m not there yet. Maybe it goes up for sale, but outside the U.S.? Who knows, maybe through your friend Dove in Paris? I’m betting they ship out the stuff that’s not covered by insurance.”

  “But why wouldn’t it all be insured?”

  “Maybe because some of it’s already hot.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Just what you think it means. I understand there’s a whole underground market in hot art. It’s dealt all over the world, on the quiet, and it seems the most respectable collectors are into it.”

  The way I read it, Al Dove’s partners must have gotten into art the way they’d gotten into a lot of other so-called legitimate businesses: for investment and diversification. They’d used Al Dove as a front man before, and even though he’d meant trouble for them before, well, like I said, you work with what you’ve got. And probably it had even been legitimate … in the beginning. Only Al Dove’s partners, b
eing businessmen, had gotten greedy, and being men of habit, had taken to stealing their wares instead of buying them. And had organized themselves accordingly. With a branch in Paris for what they couldn’t unload in America. Because in Paris, as Bernard Lascault had put it, nobody asked too many questions.

  But what had gone wrong? Had somebody begun to ask questions, and if so, who? According to Bernard Lascault, the market was soft and Al Dove lacked control. But control of what?

  I’d asked Freddy Schwartz about forgeries. He hadn’t heard anything about forgeries. I’d asked him about Helen Raven and William Rillington, and about a brother called Jonnison Davis. At first the names meant nothing to him. Then suddenly, when I went on to John Blumenstock, one of them did.

  “You remember it, don’t ya, Cagey? It was in the courts, all the papers carried it. Blumenstock’s widow versus his girl friend? Over who got custody of the paintings?”

  “Wait a minute, Freddy. What paintings?”

  “Who knows what paintings? Paintings! Blumenstock’s paintings. Helen Raven, she was the girl friend. She was with him when he drove off a cliff. No, it wasn’t a cliff. A bridge? Yeah, a bridge, I think that’s right. And she came out of it scarred for life. She showed up in court still wearing the bandages. Look, I’ll dig it all out for you, Cagey. I’ll …”

  “Okay, Freddy. But who won?”

  “Who won what?”

  “The court case.”

  “Who won the court case? Why she did, Helen Raven, wouldn’t it figure?”

  And to think he carried all that around in his little jewish noodle.

  Freddy Schwartz had had something else to tell me. I’ll get to it in due course. Meanwhile, once I’d left the gendarme holding up the entrance at Al Dove’s, I had a couple of phone calls of my own to make, and I ducked into a café at the big circle at the corner.

  The first one was to that cute little apartment I’ve mentioned up under the eaves in Montparnasse. They’re a strange breed, the girls from Air France: they’ve nothing against a little promiscuity … so long as it’s in the family. So that when Josiane answered the phone and wanted to know where I’d been and I said I’d been in jail, she hung up on me, and it took another call, complete with recriminations and apologies, for me to get what I wanted.

  The second went much more smoothly. I’d “read” the two numbers when La Ducrot tapped them out, but all I knew about them was that they were both somewhere outside Paris. I didn’t get any answer at the first one either, but my spiel to the flunkey who answered at the second went something like this:

  “Allo? This is Mr. Magnavox speaking from the International Department of American Express? I wonder if you can help me? We’re holding a transfer of funds for a Lascault, Edouard, of Rambouillet in the Yvelines, that’s Lasc … what’s that? Pardon me? You said Bernard Lascault? Lascault, Bernard? Imagine that! Who could have made such a mistake? But could I have your address please?… Yes, is that near Rambouillet in the Yvelines?… No? Where? Chantilly?… But that’s nowhere near Rambouillet, is it?… A-hah! I knew there had to be a confusion in our records, please forgive me for … what’s that? Ah yes, thank you, thank you very kindly …”

  I hung up, patted myself on the back, and after a fast croque monsieur and a Löwenbrau in the sunshine of the café terrace, the Giulia and I were off to the races. Nor were we alone. Maybe he’d been with us all morning, but I first picked him up in Al Dove’s street, a white 204 coupe with Paris plates and nothing whatsoever remarkable about him.

  SIX

  The woods around chantilly are full of people with six-figure incomes camping out in mansions that wouldn’t look out of place, say, in Marin County or Bel Air. And maybe this would be impressive enough on its own, if it wasn’t for the fact that they’ve got neighbors who can earn that kind of loot in a couple of minutes on a Sunday afternoon. The only notable difference between the two groups is that one is two-legged and the other four, and you’d be hard put to say which outswanks which. To give you an idea, the racetrack, which is the prettiest I’ve ever seen, is on the grounds of the château itself, and the winner’s purse in the Prix du Jockey in June makes the Kentucky Derby look like nickel-raise poker. All you can eat, servants to tend to your every need, and retirement at four to a lifetime of fucking, now who among us would turn that down?

  My knowledge of the area, I confess, pretty much began and ended with the track, and it took me quite some jiggling and questioning before I located the Lascault hideaway. This gave my friend in the 204 coupe fits. I drove clean through their hamlet once and out the other side, then had to turn around and head back in. We passed each other in the middle of the village. He looked at me and I at him, a nondescript guy in a nondescript car. I waved to him. Then I found a local peasant who directed me to a discreet stone wall with a wooden gate in it, tucked down a narrow alley behind the baker and the butcher, and a moment later I was piloting the Giulia through the seigneurial domain.

  I don’t know what else to call it. The house of course was enormous. Or at least I took it for the house, until I found out it belonged to the gatekeeper. The main house was considerably further along a paved road, a stately stone manse half-hidden by the trees, not very old by French standards, maybe a century or so, but beautifully proportioned and landscaped, with fans of trees on either wing and a great expanse of rolling lawn dipping away from the entrance. Majestic as the house was, though, it was the grounds that really popped my eyeballs. The French would have called it a park, and rightly so. All along the road were handsome stands of poplars, just beginning to leaf overhead. Behind them was lawn and more trees, but these planted and shaped to form perfect geometries, circles, and ovals of shade against the sunswept turf. There were spring flowers in abundance, planted in great stone urns close to the house itself, and within the circle formed there by the road I saw beds of iris on the verge of bursting. Somewhere was a pond with swans, somewhere else what looked like a rosery, with a stone-arbored walk down the center.

  And no one in sight, not a soul.

  Either Madame Lascault had a pair of very green thumbs, I thought, or the art business was a lot more booming than her husband had let on.

  I got out of the Giulia. She looked pretty grubby in those surroundings. I had the feeling I did too. I rang the front bell, and a vassal in immaculate livery let me in. When I stated my business, he took my card, ushered me into a sun-filled drawing room with a wide bay window bellying over the rear lawn and assorted outbuildings, then left me to study signatures.

  Of these there were plenty, and a few would have been familiar to me even before I started my lessons in art history. Every inch of wall space, it seemed to me, was hung with paintings, as though their owner couldn’t bear to stick a few away in a closet. It didn’t seem in the best of taste—the walls had a way of crowding you, and you couldn’t begin to look at one picture before the one above it, or below, took your eye away—but I suppose you and I might do the same if we had all those Picassos lying around. So I concentrated on the signatures, and several of them turned out to be Blumenstocks, and there was even one I kind of took a shine to, though I’d be hard pressed to say why. All it was was a diagonal slash that went across the canvas from lower left to upper right, where it broke off in a hook. The slash was in a pale sort of blue. I thought it was a pretty nice color.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it, Mr. Cage?” said a cultured voice behind me, in English. It was high-pitched, strong. I thought I might have recognized it from La Ducrot’s office.

  I turned around.

  “You are American, aren’t you?”

  It took me a long minute to get out anything at all. Remember that at the time I had no idea who Madame Bernard Lascault was, or had been. All I knew, right then, was that I’d seen her. And I knew it instantly. I even think the idea of it, the premonition, struck me a split second before I actually saw her. It was a shock all right, the more so because I’d never seen her in the flesh, only sitting erect on a gari
sh purple couch, larger-than-life-sized, in a lime-colored gown and turbaned, and a set of spotlights shining on her startled face.

  She was wearing a long-sleeved gray jersey dress which came down to mid-calf. Her hair was gray-blond, shoulder-length, and not a strand out of place. Her face was long, her features sharply outlined. She had tight lips, a sharp straight nose, hazel eyes. She must have been in her mid-fifties and it showed, in the mottled skin of her hands and some dark, precadaverous hollows around her eyes. Her posture was what I could only call aristocratic. She was tall and thin to begin with, and she carried her shoulders thrust slightly forward, which concaved her chest and elongated her curving spine. It gave her a long-stemmed, titless look, one I associate with dames from the upper crust, and to such an extent I suspect they practice it in front of mirrors. No beauty at all, Madame Bernard Lascault, but a certain class—if you go for the class.

  “Excusez-moi,” she said in a strongly accented French, “je vous ai pris pour un Américain.”

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Lascault,” I said finally. “I’m American.”

  “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure …?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t believe we have.”

  “Then what can I do for you? Won’t you sit down?”

  I sat down. She sat across from me. It was improvising time, but my imagination was galloping a couple of city blocks ahead, even though all I had for sure was that a dead painter had painted her portrait with a man who wasn’t her current husband. He’d done her justice too, in a cruel sort of way. Except that the picture had been called a fake.

  I told her I’d really come to see her husband, and the interview almost ended right there. She stiffened at the name. Her chin lifted angrily. She said he wasn’t home. She started to stand up. The telephone shrillness was in her voice, and her posture, suddenly stiff and erect, reminded me of the painting.