The French Kiss Read online

  “Look, Mrs. Lascault,” I said, staying put, “I don’t know to what extent you’re aware of it, but some pretty unpleasant things have been going on lately in your husband’s field.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “People have been beaten up, the police have been impersonated, there’s been a man murdered. Others have disappeared, nobody seems to know where to, and as far as the Paris police are concerned, they seem strangely uninterested.”

  I started over at the thumb when I ran out of fingers, but the more I went on, the more she seemed to relax, and her body subsided into the chair, a high-backed modern affair in white molded foam.

  A curious reaction.

  I looked at the wall behind her, at the pale blue diagonal slash.

  “I take it somebody here is specially interested in Blumenstocks. Would that be Mr. Lascault?”

  “They belong to me,” she answered firmly, pinching her lips together. “Everything you see here is mine.” I caught the emphasis, but then her voice went languid. “But enough pleasantries, Mr. Cage. Whom are you working for? For Alan Dove, I suppose?”

  “I thought I was working for your husband,” I said. Taking the check from my pocket, I smoothed it out on the coffee table between us. I turned it around so that it faced her. She leaned forward.

  “You come rather cheap, don’t you?” she said. “But at least you were paid. What did he hire you to do?”

  “There were some people he wanted me to investigate for him.”

  “What people?”

  I thought about it for a moment.

  “Alan Dove, in fact,” I said. “Also a woman called Helen Raven.”

  “Alan …?” she began. She started to laugh, then caught herself. The shrillness was back in her tone. “And what did you find out?”

  “You’ll excuse me, Mrs. Lascault, but I think that should be between me and your husband.”

  “Oh?” She started again, like the dame in the picture. “It’s a professional secret, is it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But he hired you to investigate … them?”

  “That’s right.”

  The surprise in her expression gave way to a smile. Not a nice smile.

  “Well,” she said, “I don’t think it matters, Mr. Cage. I don’t think he’d be particularly interested in what you found out. Not at all. In fact I don’t think he’d give a damn, not the slightest damn. Or anyone else. You’ve wasted your time, Mr. Cage. Too bad, I’m sure it was valuable. But it’s all over, the whole disgusting affair.”

  This was the same message I’d heard from the Law the night before. Only this time, with a suddenness I hadn’t expected, it overflowed into something else.

  “So what did you find out?” she shrilled at me. “Never mind! You don’t have to tell me, let me guess! You found out that Alan Dove and his wife are petty crooks, didn’t you? Didn’t you find that out? A pair of cheap chiseling opportunists? You didn’t have to bust your balls to find it out, did you? And Helen Raven …”

  Her voice broke into a raucous scorn.

  “… that fraudulent whore. I bet you feel sorry for her too. Don’t you? All the world feels sorry for Helen, why would you be any different? Poor, scarred Helen, that bitch-cunt. Did you put your nose into her, Mr. Cage? I bet you got down on all fours and put your nose into her. Disgusting! But that’s how you find out about Helen, Mr. Cage, you have to snuffle her like a pig! Well, but at least you got paid for it, didn’t you? Otherwise you’d have stolen your pay, Mr. Cage. You can’t fool me. I could have told him all you found out in two minutes. That cheap sucking whore, she …”

  She stopped cold, as if she’d only just heard what she was saying. But then, hearing it, she started to laugh. And then:

  “Tell me, Mr. Cage, did you find out the big secret? The biggest secret of all?”

  But the laughter took her again. It shook her in gusts, grating, vindictive, and her body gave way to it like stones cracking in an avalanche. She tried to talk through it, something about her husband, about there being no honor among thieves, but then she started to cough instead. The coughing wracked her, twisted her. She jerked forward. I thought she was going to plunge onto the table, but she caught herself as quickly, and coughed violently, and pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve, blew hard, twice, and rocked back, and her eyes darted like she was looking for something to throw. The air in the room trembled and seethed. I prepared to duck. Instead her eyes lit on my check, Bernard Lascault’s check. She seized on it in triumph. Laughing again, she ripped it down the center. Then she ripped the two pieces down the center savagely, and the four after that. Then when she couldn’t rip any more—there’s a limit, even when your muscles are popping with meanness—she let fly, loosing her clenched fist over the coffee table in a shower of paper shreds.

  We watched them spray down: my first earned income in how many moons?

  She wasn’t laughing any more.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Cage,” she said coldly. “I’ll pay you for your work.”

  Unlike other semihysterical binges I’d witnessed, though, there was no visible release for her in it. She’d fought for control and won it, but in the process her body had gone stiff like petrified wood. Her chin was up, her eyes sunken, immobilized.

  “Do you know what they want from me, Mr. Cage?”

  When I didn’t say anything, she answered herself: “Two million francs. Two million francs, that’s a great deal of money for three paintings, wouldn’t you say? Between four and five hundred thousand dollars? Two of which paintings have never been offered for sale and the third of which was once withdrawn from auction for lack of an acceptable offer?”

  It was, I thought, a great deal of money under any circumstances.

  “Do you know what the top bid was for it then, Mr. Cage? Twelve thousand dollars. The top bid and the only bid.”

  “Did you make it, Mrs. Lascault?” I asked.

  She didn’t seem to hear the question. I wanted to ask too if she’d stolen it instead, or had had it stolen, and a lot of other things that were percolating in my brain, but her eyes were a thousand miles away. Or years. Whatever she was seeing made her lips tighten a little harder. The color squeezed out of them, and her cheekbones took on the sheen and pallor of a death mask.

  She broke out of it finally

  “Two million francs. That was the price, Mr. Cage. Either that or they’d be sold on the open market.” With a half-snort she tossed her head, and the gray-blonde of her hair flipflopped gently before falling back into place. “I want those paintings, Mr. Cage. I’ll tell you what I’m prepared to pay now. Five hundred thousand. Francs, that is. Five hundred thousand francs for three paintings. Notice that I said three. No more, no less. That too is my top bid and my only bid. Five hundred thousand francs. And under the circumstances I’d say it was an extremely generous one, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Particularly if one of the three is a fake, yes, I would.”

  She looked at me appraisingly. Her eyelids drooped slightly and her lashes seemed to quiver. Otherwise the room right then was as still as a morgue.

  “I think we understand each other,” came her reply.

  Even though I didn’t, not yet, I was ready then to admire her style. At least she was a woman who knew what she wanted and what she was prepared to pay to get it. That takes a certain class. But then she had to go and ruin the image.

  “You strike me as a clever man, Mr. Cage,” she said. “I take it you didn’t come here to see my husband, not at all. Obviously. Still, I think you deserve some compensation for your efforts. Let me make you a proposition then.”

  She glanced down at the bits of paper on the coffee table. They made her smile. It was her second smile of the day and, as I recall, the last one I ever saw.

  “We’ll put it on a perfectly business basis,” she said. “My offer, as I’ve told you, is five hundred thousand francs. You can simply pass that along if you like, in which case I’ll pay you doubl
e what my husband paid you. But if you prefer, I’d be happy to let you negotiate within that ceiling. Let’s agree that … half?… yes, why not half?… of whatever you save me will be yours to keep?”

  Normally I’m not averse to propositions, at least to listening, but the half stuck in my craw. And maybe if she’d pulled out her checkbook right then, I’d have torn it up too. But she didn’t, needless to say. People like that don’t pay up front. Instead she was already on her feet, shoulders forward, her hand extended.

  What is it about the rich that makes you let them get away with it? Or is that why they’re rich?

  I said something to the effect that I’d think her proposition over. I took her hand. It was limp in mine and cold all right, like ice.

  SEVEN

  I swung out past the gatehouse. I didn’t look back, The guy in the white 204 was waiting for me, picking his nose behind the wheel. He was about as inconspicuous as a Good Humor truck in a village that size. I didn’t wait for him to free his finger either, and it wasn’t till I neared the autoroute that I slowed down for him.

  I’ve a theory about tails and the people who hire them. If they’re that interested in knowing where I’m going, then I’d as soon they knew … till the right time comes. Otherwise they get nervous and fidgety, and people who hire tails are nervous enough already. So it wasn’t to save his job that I took it easy on the autoroute, and when he almost lost me coming off at Clignancourt, I stopped by a kiosk and made a show of buying a newspaper till he picked me up again. He was with me at the hotel, then someone else took over that night in Montparnasse, and the next time I spotted the first one he’d traded in the Peugeot for a navy blue Renault 5 and he was working on his ear with a Q-tip.

  By that time, though, it mattered even less. Or ought to have. I’d decided to take the Law’s advice. Circumstances partly beyond my control had put me into the middle of an ugly situation. From what I learned that night in Montparnasse, it was probably going to get uglier. For my pains I’d had a lesson in why the rich are rich, salutary maybe, but Mrs. Bernard Lascault could find herself another messenger. And as for the other side of it, well, he’d said it himself, hadn’t he? I owe you one, baby. I’m going to pay you back and then we’ll be quits. Sure Al, and good luck with your two million, and send me a postcard from paradise.

  In other words, I was like Rip Van Winkle, only if Mr. Van Winkle had woken up in the late twentieth century and taken a look around, chances are he’d have gone back to sleep.

  Or tried to.

  I’m going to tell you a story now. In many ways it’s an exemplary tale, and it’ll go a long way toward filling in the gaps. It did mine. I heard it that night, or most of it, up under the eaves in Montparnasse, from the guy I’d asked Josiane to invite over for a drink, a fellow countryman called Elliott Grunen. Elliott Grunen, I should say, wasn’t my type, and I never could see what the Air France mafia saw in him, except maybe a certain bisexual ingenuity. He was one of those professional America baiters who’d come to Europe years ago with an ample inheritance, which he’d been squandering ever since on a variety of fancy no-capitals publications nobody read. One of them, however, was, or had been, a slick bilingual affair called l’amateur d’art in French and the art lover in English. Elliott Grunen, I figured, ought to know just what I was after, and in this I was very right.

  The story then:

  Once upon a time when our country was younger and richer, the art center of the western world was a small and seedy corner of New York City known as the East Village. Thousands of would-be paintpushers came there from all over, lured by a bunch of artists who’d already staked out the territory and were just then making it big, men with some of those double-play-combination names I’ve cited, like Pollock, Gorky, deKooning, Kline. Taken together, they were known as the Abstract Expressionists. According to their boosters, they’d made a revolution, and some of them were still around to tell about it, in the proverbial cold-water flats and lofts which now had steam heat, and holding court in a local joint called the Cedar Tavern to a whole horde of camp followers. Among these was a young aspirant from the Midwest called John Blumenstock.

  John Blumenstock, though, had three strikes against him when it came to making it in that scene: 1) he was a serious painter; 2) his personality; 3) he took his masters straight. The work he turned out in those days was directly in the Abstract Expressionist line. Probably it was testament to how good he was that he got any notice at all, because nobody could care less about a second generation of painters when the living legends of the first were just beginning to pull down big money for their production. The more so when the second generation was a private, slack-jawed, quiet kid who earned his bread working as a clerk-typist on Wall Street. According to Elliott Grunen, other artists praised his work even then, and it had been shown in group shows, but to the public he was unknown, to the art hucksters he was a hopeless case, and if history had been left to its course, he might one day have ended up a footnote, in one of those slick no-capitals magazines nobody reads.

  As it was, he got discovered.

  Her name was Judith Springberg, people in the know called her “Cookie,” and even I had heard of the family, if not this particular member. Like most jews who crossed the ocean early enough, the Springbergs had made their pile more than once, and in more than one way. Later on, the sources of their loot went mostly anonymous—it’s safer that way, for taxes as well as anti-Semitism—but for all those Springberg heirs to devote their lives to the best causes, you know they’ve got it stashed away somewhere.

  In any case, Cookie Springberg’s chosen cause was Art. Or rather: Artists. To hear Elliott Grunen tell it, she’d been born with a checkbook between her legs and at one time or another she’d tried to buy them all. She too was a habitué of the Cedar Tavern scene; she too had gotten to be a legend in her own time. But once they’d used her, once they’d been fed and sheltered and sucked and suckled by Cookie Springberg, the artists left her dry, with nothing to show for it, so the legend went, but a shrill voice and jangled nerves and, along the way, a collection that would have had most museum directors slavering outside the service entrance of her mansion.

  She was thirty-six and John Blumenstock twenty-eight when they got married. Put charitably, it was love at second sight; put Elliott Grunen’s way, they were each other’s last hope. Because if Cookie Springberg bought Blumenstock, she also made him. Overnight the good painter became the great young American painter. Even what had worked against him before turned to glamour in her hands. That he was shy or private made him a man of mystery. That he’d stuck to Abstract Expressionism when others had dropped it made him courageous. That he was Midwestern Protestant made him vintage American, like corn on the cob. Suddenly here was a genuine home-grown product, tailor-made for the media. His first one-man exhibition, in the right gallery on New York’s 57th Street, was sold out before it opened.

  They stayed together some six years, a fertile period as far as his work was concerned. But then, at least according to the official history, John Blumenstock blew it all. He took to booze, then to dope. He wrecked one friendship after another, and what little work he did was sheer fad-following. The villain of the piece, the one responsible for his downfall, was an aggressive and opportunistic young art critic. Her name? Helen Raven. It was Helen Raven who’d pushed him into disastrous experimenting, Helen Raven who’d run through his fortune, Helen Raven who’d driven him in the end to suicide. Because if the cause of death had gone down in the books as accidental, it was common knowledge that Blumenstock had driven his car off a bridge in a drunken rage, and the fact that Helen Raven had been the one to survive, with only a face scarred for life once they’d finished picking the windshield out of it, was just the last irony in the tragedy.

  The only trouble with the official history, as passed on by Elliott Grunen, was that its author was Cookie Springberg Blumenstock. Because from what I knew as well as some of the things Grunen said, there were other ways o
f looking at it. In any case, for several years after his death, Helen Raven had had to fight in the courts for possession of the late Blumenstocks. Cookie was his widow, and since he’d left no will, she claimed the entire estate. It had been a bloody battle, it must have been an expensive one, and the winner had come away with a handful of paintings nobody wanted. Because if Helen Raven had managed to prove ownership, at least to the satisfaction of her judges, Cookie had thereupon set out to discredit the late work in every way she could, as only she could.

  “But were they any good?” I asked Elliott Grunen.

  “The late Blumenstocks?” He made a face. “Careless, I’d say. Of course he’d gone representational. They were interesting. He had tremendous vitality, even then. Of course I’ve only seen one. In recent years, that is.”

  “The one that’s been in the papers?”

  “That’s right. The self-portrait. Of course I was there the other night.” (And of course it was like him to let you know such things.)

  “But that one’s a fake, isn’t that what they’re saying?”

  He smiled knowingly. “Of course a lot of things are called fake these days. If it’s a fake it’s a very good one.”

  “How many are there?” I asked him.

  “How many of what?”

  “Of the late Blumenstocks.”

  “I wouldn’t know. Only a few. I don’t think anyone knows exactly. Of course Helen Raven would, she lived with him. But since when are you into art? I wouldn’t have thought it was your bag.”

  His smile veered off into condescension …

  “It’s not,” I said. “I was more interested in Cookie.”

  … to disappear into surprise. “Oh? You mean the eminent Mrs. Lascault?”

  “That’s right,” I said, grinning back at him. “I just met her this afternoon.”

  It was almost dawn when Air France took off and the Giulia and I drove home down the Rue d’Assas. The way it looked to me, Al Dove and Helen Raven had joined forces to shake Cookie Springberg Blumenstock Lascault’s money tree, conceivably with Bernard Lascault’s help. Only Cookie Lascault wasn’t having any part of it, and maybe she’d even gone so far as to hire her own private army of phony Law to prove the point. From what I’d gathered, the portrait of her and Blumenstock probably wasn’t a fake, but it had been pretty astute to call it one in public—a million and a half francs’ worth of astuteness, if you wanted to look at it that way. I hadn’t seen it that afternoon, but I was willing to bet it was already somewhere in the Chantilly mansion, and the only reason Al Dove still had a shot at half a million francs was that she wanted the other ones that went with it.