The Stiff Upper Lip Page 9

  I made out clumps and humps on the floor under the lowest layer of smoke. At first I took them for cushions, but they were human all right, single and clustered, frozen into the postures of the sleeping or the stoned. Then one of them stirred at my feet, a bent one that was held in place by the junction of floor and wall. It lifted a head, pointed an arm in a vague gesture.

  “In there,” it said.

  “In where?” I answered, my voice suddenly loud. This set off a stirring among the clumps, but the one that had directed me sank back into never-never land.

  Across the room, I could pick out a thin pencil line of yellow light at floor level, with the outline of a door above it. I made my way over, careful to avoid stepping on the heads.

  The bright light of the second room set my eyes to blinking. Apparently it had been the kitchen, back in the days when kitchens doubled as family rooms. And maybe it still was, because there was an old-style single sink in a corner, plus a cooker and sawed-off refrigerator, both old models. There were dishes in the sink too. But the homiest touch of all, in the junk and clutter, were two more Yamahas parked against the far wall.

  In the center of the room, under the ceiling globe, was a big oval wood table that had seen better days. It was strewn with papers, some of them weighted by what looked like a toolbox.

  Sitting behind the table, his glasses up in his hair, his head down, was one Robert H. Goldstein, better known to me as Bobby H.

  “Better close the door, Cage, and sit down,” said Bobby H. He didn’t look up. “I’ll be with you in a second. Help yourself if you smoke the stuff. It’s Dutch grade.”

  He had a pocket calculator out on the table next to him and punched figures into it from small slips of paper, then transcribed the results into a long cardboard-bound ledger, then crumpled the slips of paper and dropped them onto the floor. On my side of the table were the remains of a loaf of hash about the size of a brick. It had been wrapped in aluminum foil, remnants of which were still folded over the end of it.

  “Or stand up if you want,” said Bobby H., concentrating on his work.

  I pulled out a chair and sat down. There was something about him that affected me that way. I took out my tobacco pouch, stuffed a pipe and lit up. He wrinkled his nose at the smoke. Later on, he said something to the effect that tobacco could kill you.

  He looked about the same as the last time I’d seen him, a skinny Jewish kid with freckles and tired eyes. He had on the same neckless baseball shirt, with a red-and-black lumberjack over it. I knew he was twenty-four, but any law-shy saloonkeeper would have asked him for proof of his age.

  “I hear my old man’s upped the ante on me again,” he said, still not looking up.

  I didn’t say anything. I wondered idly how he knew.

  “I talked to him, you know? I called the mother up. Like it was his birthday.”

  He finished with the last of his slips, crumpled and dropped it, then pushed some papers together and piled them on top of the toolbox, then the ledger on top of the papers.

  “The mother can’t accept the idea that I’m making a bigger profit than he is.”

  “What’s all that,” I asked, gesturing at the pile. “Toting up the day’s take?”

  “Not just the day’s,” he said with a laugh. “You let the paperwork pile up, it … But hey!”

  He’d just glanced at me. Now he adjusted his glasses and took a closer look.

  “Hey, man, you know you look like somebody’s been working you over with a pick and a shovel?”

  “That’s not far from it.”

  “Holy shit! Who did it?”

  “Never mind. Besides, you didn’t go to all the trouble of hauling me out here just to commiserate.”

  “Trouble? It’s no trouble. Like we do it all the time.”

  “Sure, and what’s your accident rate?”

  He didn’t get that at first. Then he laughed enthusiastically.

  “You talking about Billy Wheels? He’s a mother on a bike, honh? He doesn’t have a broken bone in his body, you know? Not that I’d ride with him on a bet!”

  It was a nice time for him to tell me.

  “Look, man,” he went on, “the thing is this, you know? I want to get this bullshit with my old man straightened out once and for all. I don’t have the time to hassle with him. You know what the mother wants? He wants me to come back and learn the business. Books, man, isn’t that the pits? The total pits? In five years, he says, I’ll be a vice-president, in ten years he’s retiring and it’ll all be mine. Shit, man, I’m the one who’s going to be retiring, and in a lot less than ten years!”

  He paused, for effect.

  “Business is that good?” I asked.

  “That good? Are you putting me on? Hash is the biggest growth product in France, man. We’ve only begun to touch the market, only begun! It’s a volume market out there, all it wants is price and product, and that’s what we’re giving them. Shit, that stuff you see there, you figure it out. That’s grade hash, man. Sells for two francs a gram in Amsterdam if you can buy volume. When it gets out on the street here, it goes for anywhere from ten to twelve depending. A little cheaper in Paris, you know? A little higher outside? Translate that into kilos, you’ll see the kind of margins we’re operating on. But we’re talking about tons, man! Fucking tons! And no advertisiing, low over head.”

  “What about the competition?”

  “The competition? The hell you say. This isn’t like the States, man, it’s wide open! Sure there’re other people selling hash in Paris, we know them, they know us. But they can’t get near the market like we can, not when it comes to hash. Shit, they try to sell us the stuff! Wholesale, you know? And sometimes we buy it, depending. But you got to be careful, you know? Buying in Paris. People here are packing horseshit, literally, and selling it for Dutch grade.”

  “People like Dédé Delatour?”

  “Delatour’s a total jerk-off, you know? So is Loulou. But that’s where it’s at, man, don’t you see? You want me to let you in on the secret?”

  “Yeah, Bobby,” I said, “why don’t you do that?”

  He didn’t need encouragement from me, though. He was only warming to his subject.

  “It’s one product, man. One product. You find one quality product that the public wants, you bring it to them at a fair price with a big margin, you keep your overhead down, and that’s where it’s at. That’s where what they teach you in business school is so much bullshit, you know? Diversify, they say, conglomerates, spread out the risk. Total bullshit. You take my old man, he’s in book publishing, right? And he does pretty well, right? So you know what he just did with the profits? He bought an amusement park! In Florida, man! A fucking amusement park, you know? Now, what does he know about Ferris wheels? Not a goddam thing. So he’s going to have to hire a team of high-priced executives to run it for him, right, and before he knows it, his overhead’s going to go right through the fucking roof! Isn’t that the pits? We deal in one product, man. Hash, quality grade. We won’t even touch the heavy stuff. People are trying to sell it to us all the time, you know? Shit, some of our customers are screaming for it! But let them get it elsewhere, I don’t care. Simplify, that’s the secret! Not diversify, totally simplify! If the people ever stop smoking hash, like we’ll go out of business, that’s all. You take the bookkeeping, you know? You know what our bookkeeping consists of? One book, man. Simple. It’s all right here, every transaction. Go ahead, take a look.”

  He took the cardboard ledger off the pile and slung it over to my side of the table.

  “What about the Law?” I said.

  “Well, what about them? They’ve got to catch us first, man. We travel light, you know? By the time you leave here, we’ll be packing up, moving on. Tomorrow night we’ll be some place else, and the night after that. Sure, every so often they nail somebody, the distributors mostly. But what’re they going to do? It’s like this, man: did you ever read Borges?”

  “Who?”


  “Borges. Jorge Luis Borges, you know? Anyway, he wrote a story about a bunch of cartographers. Mapmakers? They’ve been assigned to make a new map of their country. Except that they’re so hung up on getting every last total detail of the country onto the map that they end up making a map as big as the country itself! You get it? It’s a paradox, you know? But that’s what they’d have to do to suppress hash: arrest every man, woman, and child under thirty in all fucking France. Total arrest, man. The whole population!”

  “I see what you mean,” I said. “But suppose they arrested you?”

  “So? So somebody else takes over. Like I already got mine stashed away. What comes in now is just frosting on the cake.”

  “You might have to wait a few years to get it.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Do you? From what I hear, the penalties in France are pretty stiff. They can lock you up and throw away the key.”

  “Not in my case.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  He grinned and, propping his glasses back up on his head, stretched out his arms.

  “Because if worst comes to worst, Cage, my old man’ll get me off, you know? Or hire somebody like you to do it for him.”

  What I’ve put down here wasn’t the half of it. As it turned out, we had a long wait, and, like most Jews, Bobby H. couldn’t resist the chance to show off how sharp he was. From what he said, I got the feeling the product counted less for him than the action. I mean, he could as well have been peddling yarmelkes to the Eskimos. It was a tradition as old as Moses, and you knew too that if things ever went wrong and the bottom fell out of the skullcap trade, you’d hear him shouting anti-Semitism all the way to the bank.

  At some point he took the toolbox off the pile of papers and opened it up. It was one of those models that have the little divided trays on top for the screws and washers, with the big stuff underneath. Only in this case, when he lifted out the tray, the big stuff was all cash. It ranged from ten-franc notes on up. He fished around till he’d come up with ten five-hundred-franc jobs. He squared them into a pile, then counted them like a bank teller, then pinned them together French-style and tossed them across the table toward me. This was just a down payment, he said. There’d be the same each week, cash, for as long as necessary. It was for me to keep his old man happy, and if I couldn’t keep him happy, then at least off his back. Because he was tired of all the bullshit and he had better things to worry about.

  I let the money lie there, next to the cardbard ledger. It will still lying there when we heard the sound of a motor out in the street. It was a two-wheeler all right.

  “That’ll be them,” said Bobby H. “It’s about time. Three fucking hours. You sit tight, man, I’ll go get them.” He went out a back door. A minute or two later he was back, followed by a woman I’d never seen before, followed by my onetime chauffeur, Billy Wheels, followed by the little waif in the long dress. I didn’t know how they’d made it, three on a bike, but their faces were red and they were blowing hard. Between them, Billy Wheels and the waif lifted the Yamaha over the doorsill and parked it against the back wall, next to the others.

  The woman had on a navy-blue cloth coat with the collar up. Her hair was black, curly, and streaked with gray. The gray, I guessed, might have been premature. She looked out of place in that kitchen. For a couple of seconds, though, I thought that was just the contrast between her get-up and the surroundings.

  “We’re late,” said Billy Wheels, catching his breath. “Man, we had a bitchin’ time making the connection.”

  “Poor Cage,” said Valérie, taking off the wig and shaking her hair out. “They really worked you over, didn’t they. Les salauds. Here, let me see.”

  10

  Normally you can make Paris-Brussels in three hours by the Autoroute du Nord and not even work up a sweat. But we were on the road twice that long the next day. For one thing, we stayed off the Autoroute du Nord, and for a long stretch after Reims and up through the Ardennes we weren’t on any autoroute at all. Then too, we weren’t going to Brussels.

  Not even to Belgium, except to pass through.

  That was only something she’d said for Bobby H.’s benefit.

  She’d said a lot of things for Bobby H.’s benefit. She’d put on quite a show. By the time she was done, the coffee had been brewed, the sky was growing light, and some of the other members of the Hash Collective had come stumbling out of the next room, looking for empty cups. She had Bobby H.’s five thousand francs in her purse, and there was a VW Beetle parked out in front of the house. The Beetle was for us. It had seen better days, but it had German plates and rental papers made out to yours truly. Bobby H. had worked it out with a garage in Montrouge, and Billy Wheels had gone to pick it up for us.

  She kissed Bobby goodbye. A tender clinch, even touching. Then we drove off, under a swollen gray sky that didn’t look like it would brighten much, and Valérie said to me:

  “Any time you want now, Cage.”

  “Any time I want what?”

  “Out,” she said, “Any time you want, you can stop the car and get out.”

  I glanced at her. She had the wig back on, and the frumpy coat, and she didn’t look like she’d last till the first toll booth.

  “What makes you think I want out?” I said.

  “I could read it in your face. The minute I walked in last night. The way you stared at me.”

  “Stared at you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But that was only my natural loving expression, baby.”

  She didn’t answer. Her mouth went tight and her eyes fixed on the windshield.

  I shook my head.

  “No way,” I said. “It’s too much fun. It’s not every day I get to spend the night tied to a chair and have my face scrambled. Hell, now I’ve got half of Paris looking for me. I’m having a ball. What’s more, it’s all for free.”

  “You blame it on me too, don’t you?”

  “In a way,” I said. “The way I figure it, you got me in, now you’re going to get me out. The only way out is Roscoe, and that’s where we’re going now, isn’t that right? Unless, that is, you want to tell me where to find him myself. In which case, you could be the one to get out.”

  You never know. Maybe I laid it on a little thick. Maybe she was already strung out from having crossed half the map of Europe since I’d seen her last. In other words, maybe the tears staining her cheeks were genuine enough.

  At least they were quieter than the last time.

  Around about then I spotted a filling station. I pulled in next to the pumps. She got out and headed for the toilets. I watched her go, while the gas jockey filled up the Beetle. When she came back, the wig was gone and she’d worked some on her face. It helped. She still didn’t look, though, like she’d last till the first toll booth.

  “We’re in it together, then?” she said.

  “It looks that way.”

  “O.K. Then let me tell you what happened.”

  “Later. Catch some sleep first.”

  She shook her head.

  “I need to talk now,” she said.

  “O.K.,” I said, turning the key in the ignition. “Talk now.”

  She did too, some fifteen minutes’ worth, before her eyes closed and she nodded off. I turned on the car radio. Later on, when she woke up, we talked some more. It had started to rain. Then she took over the driving and I caught some sleep. The way it worked out, we had plenty of time for all of it: driving, sleeping, talking, working the windshield wipers. Even listening to the radio. Which turned out to be pretty important too.

  After I’d left them at the Neuilly apartment, she and Roscoe had it out. Roscoe hadn’t lied to us because of her or Marie-Josèphe Lamentin. Marie-Josèphe, he’d told her, was just something that had happened. But it was me, he’d said. He didn’t trust me, never had. Number one: I was a honkie. Number two: I knew Johnny Vee. Number three: I struck him like the kind of honkie who’d sell his mother if the price
was right.

  At which Valérie had blown her stack. If that was how he really felt, she’d told him, then he could count her out too.

  At which Roscoe had said that he was through lying, that if I could fix up his alibi with Marie-Josèpbe he wasn’t going to mistrust me any more, and he swore it, and then Valérie had gone out to buy food and spotted the stake-out sitting in a white 504 across the street.

  She hadn’t known who he was, she said. But when he followed her, she figured there was more to be gained by inviting him up than pretending to ignore him. So she’d invited him up.

  Back in the apartment, Roscoe had played possum at first. It was only when the stake-out started helping Valérie lay out the food that he made his move. One grab and he had his gun arm, then his gun, then the scruff of his neck.

  Roscoe had shaken it out of him that he worked for Delatour. Delatour, Roscoe knew, was Johnny Vee’s French connection. The stake-out claimed not to know anything about that. He claimed too not to know why Delatour wanted them watched, only that he was supposed to report in once every hour.

  This left them with a choice to make, and little time to make it in. If Delatour was on to them, the chances were he was also on to me. Conceivably I walking into a trap, but it was already too late to warn me. Furthermore, the Neuilly apartment was blown, they had no other place to fall back on.

  In the end, hoping that I could fend for myself, they decided to take off.

  They drove as far as St. Quentin in the stake-out’s car, and, as far as she knew, it was still there where they’d abandoned it two days ago. Because if the police were checking the frontiers, then probably, she’d figured, they’d stand a better chance crossing on the train. In St. Quentin they’d gotten on the Paris-Amsterdam express. The train was crowded, and when it reached the border, she made Roscoe lock himself in the toilet cubicle while she powdered her nose in the mirror. The check was only perfunctory. They got through.