The French Kiss Page 9

  The original scheme, she told me, had been to sell three late Blumenstocks quietly, through Al Dove and Arts Mondiaux. Cookie Lascault had been the intended buyer from the beginning. Apparently the Professor was hard up for money, enough to sell to a hated rival and at whatever price they could get. But Al Dove had had a better idea, call it his Rillington promotion. Rillington was Helen Raven’s lover as well as protégé, and a painter of enough talent to produce as many late Blumenstocks as the market would take, particularly with the dead man’s mistress to vouch for them. For if Cookie Lascault ever got tired of buying, her reputation as a collector was such as to start a whole new vogue. So Al Dove had laid it on the Professor, and greed and vengeance had done the rest.

  The first time anybody’d had an inkling of what he was up to, Binty said, came when the invitations to the party were sent out. That hadn’t been in the game plan, but it had been too late to do anything about it except for Binty to put Bernard Lascault onto me. They hadn’t even known Rillington himself was in Paris until I’d reported it to Commissaire Ravier, who’d reported it to Lascault. Lascault had thereupon panicked, which explained why the Law had given me such a hard time. Then he’d called Binty and Binty had caught the next plane. The ruckus at the party, they’d found out, had been Cookie’s doing. The people who’d started it belonged to the same gang as the phony Law who’d ended it. The French called them “parallel police.” Actually they worked for one of the political parties, but in between elections and revolutions they hired out to the highest bidder, and it stood to reason that Cookie could afford to pay them well, given the million-and-a-half francs’ savings she had in mind.

  If Al Dove had gotten away in the confusion that night, he’d had to leave everything behind him. Everything, that is, except the contents of the Canal St. Martin studio, plus the painter himself and Helen Raven. That I’d been there too had been an inconvenience, but only a temporary one. All they’d had to do was make sure I didn’t blow the whistle too soon. But Jonnie Davis had been a bigger obstacle. Binty didn’t know what had happened, but she guessed that Jonnie Davis had balked at the last minute. His first loyalty, after all, was to the people in California, not to Al Dove. So Al Dove had shot him in the eye for his first loyalty and dumped him in the canal, and it had taken some doing for Bernard to convince the Law to sit on the corpse for a while.

  As to Al’s whereabouts, Binty thought that less of a problem than I did. For one thing, she doubted he’d have tried to cross a frontier with a vanload of paintings. For another, he’d have to try to make contact with Cookie Lascault sooner or later. They had that end pretty well covered, she said. A third possibility occurred to me too: that Al might have abandoned ship and taken off. But no, she didn’t think that likely at all. It wasn’t his style, she said. It wasn’t Helen Raven’s either. Besides, once the California people got wind of what had happened, it would behoove Al to have as much cash as he could get his hands on before he took off. Or tried to. No, Binty said, she was pretty sure he’d be holed up somewhere not very far from Paris, waiting to make his move. We had to find him first.

  But when the time came to plug the world back in, she was the one who held back.

  “It’s funny,” she said, reaching toward me, “but now that I’m here … that we’re here … I’m spooked about out there. Just a little. It seems such a long way off, Cagey. Why don’t we just forget about it?”

  “You can forget about it,” I said. I was standing by the bed, nude except for an unbuttoned shirt, and gazing down at her. “Stay here if you want. As long as you want.”

  “Me?”

  “That’s right. But you hired me to do a job for you, remember? Sometime in the not-so-distant past, like last night? I think it’s time I got started.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said, suddenly jumping up. “You’re not going alone. I’m going with you.”

  I laughed at her. It sounded like something out of a movie, like the line the heroine was supposed to deliver when Randolph Scott buckled on his holster.

  “It’s too dangerous out there, baby,” I answered. “The Indians have pointed arrows.”

  But she didn’t laugh back. She started to get dressed with me. Around in there I began to feel a sort of twinge in my stomach.

  “Look Binty,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t work that way. You’ll have to dig up somebody else. I mean, I’ll find Al for you, I’ll deliver his head to you on a silver platter if that’s how you want it, but I’ve got to do it my own way.”

  She stared at me. The twinge came again.

  “What are you going to do when you find him?” she said.

  “What do you want me to do when I find him?”

  She hesitated. I got the feeling—a strange one—that she mightn’t have thought of that.

  “Nothing,” she said finally. “I mean, not if you can help it. Just find him, fix him, and then let us know. I’ll take care of it then. All we want is our property. I gave you my address, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did; the phone number too.”

  “It’s an apartment Bernard keeps.”

  “Yes, so you told me.” It was my turn to hesitate, but I said it anyway: “Look Binty, you’re not by any chance going a little soft and sentimental over ole Al, are you?”

  “No,” she said emphatically. “It’s just that …”

  “Just that what?”

  She turned to me. Her gaze dropped.

  “It’s just that he’s scared of you, Cagey.”

  “Scared? Who, Al? Of me?”

  “That’s why I put Bernard onto you in the first place. I thought you might scare him off.”

  “Scare him off? Are you kidding?”

  Her eyes came up to mine.

  “You don’t know him, Cagey,” she said. “Not at all. He’s scared to death of you. He always has been.”

  In the end we compromised. I let her go with me as far as a café on the Boulevard St. Germain. When we got out on the street outside the hotel, she took my arm. She said the sun was bothering her eyes. It was bright and we’d been indoors for over twenty-four hours, but the Paris sun is never that bright.

  She was better at the café. We sat on the sidewalk and watched the world go by. She ordered a croque monsieur and I had a croque madame and we washed them down with chilled Muscadet. But then it was time for me to go to work, and when I told her what I had in mind she got the jitters again.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” I said to her. “I’m going to pretend like I’m going to the john. You’re going to sit here, say, another five minutes, like you’re waiting for me to come back. Then you’re going to pay the bill and leave.”

  “What do you mean? What’s going to happen to you?”

  “Don’t make a big deal of it and don’t turn around, but the two gents who’ve been following me are standing inside at the bar. I spotted them coming out of the hotel. They’re pretty harmless, I’d say, but it’s time I found out who’s paying them.”

  She didn’t like the idea at all, though. The panic button was lit in her eyes. She took my hand, squeezed it, hard.

  “Unless you are?” I said on a hunch.

  She shook her head.

  “Or Bernard?”

  No, not Bernard either.

  She gripped my hand harder. Suddenly I had the impression she couldn’t get any words out. That wasn’t like her, not at all.

  “Look,” I said, “just do what I told you. Stay here about five minutes, drink some more wine, then pay the waiter and leave. Take a taxi, go back to Lascault’s apartment. Double-lock the door if you’re worried. Then wait for me to call.”

  She nodded, tight-lipped.

  “Kiss me again,” she managed in a low voice.

  “I can’t,” I said, grinning and freeing my hand as I stood up, “I’m only going to the john.”

  I went inside to the bar. The telephone and the toilets were downstairs and to get there I had to pass my two friends. Predictably they du
cked their heads over their glasses as I went by. Like I said, I’d spotted them when we came out of the hotel, sitting side by side in the navy blue Renault 5, and I’d been surprised at first to see the two of them together. But then I’d realized what a long wait they’d had, and I’d figured I ought to apologize.

  What they had no way of knowing, though, was that there was a second way out of the café cellar. Another set of stairs came up past the curve in the bar, out of their line of vision. I went down one flight and up the other and out between the tables onto the side street. A couple of minutes later I was sitting behind the wheel of the Renault 5, rummaging in the shelves under the dashboard until I found what I was looking for.

  I copied the name and address off the registration, then walked leisurely back to the Boulevard St. Germain. Instead of returning to our café, though, I crossed to another one on the shady side, where I found a good seat, about fourth-row center.

  Binty was just paying the waiter when I sat down. I watched her get up and cross to the edge of the sidewalk, a small pale face in a raincoat with one arm waving out into the traffic. An empty cab shot across the boulevard to get her, leaving minor mayhem in his wake, and at the same time the two tails burst out of the café. They looked like they were arguing. One of them—my nosepicking friend—jumped inconspicuously into a trailing cab, while his partner did a 360-degree every-which-way neck swivel on the sidewalk. Then I lost him when he disappeared back into the gloom of the café, to pick him up again a moment later when he emerged onto the side street. He looked my way, then the other, and then he took off, running like hell.

  NINE

  I don’t believe in telepathy, and if anxiety’s sometimes contagious, the gnaw in my guts when she’d gone off could as well have been gas.

  Or love.

  I sat in the café on the shady side of the boulevard, trying to add it all up. Some of the totals came out right, some of them didn’t. But whatever she might have fudged on earlier, the panic had been real enough. In her grip, in her eyes.

  Then why the hell’d you send her off by herself? said the inner voice. Because I only ride alone, I answered; haven’t you ever heard of Lonesome Cage? The inner voice snickered. Then stop worrying about it, lover boy. She’s a big girl now, she can take care of herself.

  The first call I made, though, when I went back to the hotel, was to the number she’d given me to Lascault’s private pad. It took me a couple of tries to get through, and then I plugged into Bernard Lascault’s voice, asking me in French, then in English, to leave a message after the first beep. I heard the first beep. I couldn’t think of anything to say to Bernard Lascault. I heard the second beep and hung up.

  She’d been caught in the traffic, I told myself.

  I dialed the Chantilly mansion. I played it straight this time, and it got me nowhere. Madame was indisposed and not to be disturbed. No, Monsieur wasn’t there either, he wasn’t expected back until tomorrow. If I cared to leave a message and a phone number …?

  I didn’t care to.

  Then I dialed the pad again, and after a string of busy signals, I broke in on Bernard Lascault’s taped voice. I hung up on him and got onto Arts Mondiaux, but it was a Saturday and they must have unplugged the computer. Then I tried my Aunt Minnie in Yakima and a few dozen other people I’ve known here and there around the globe, trying to make contact somewhere, but the world was out to lunch and it was a hell of a long lunch. Then I tried the pad again, and this time, between the busy signals, a voice came on telling me the number had been changed and giving me another number to dial where they’d give me the new number. Then I tried that other number and got no answer. Then I tried the first number and got a busy signal. Then I banged down the receiver, vowing to send back the next telephone bill unpaid and giving them a number where they could find out my new address, but no sooner had it hit the cradle than with a ring it jumped back into my hand.

  “The miracle of modern communications,” said Freddy Schwartz hoarsely, “I never get over it. Six thousand miles away and all you got to do is dial the digits. So? Are you ready to listen this time, Cagey?”

  I looked at my watch. It was early morning in California, too early for him to have gotten his edge on. That meant Freddy Schwartz at his long-winded worst. He didn’t disappoint me either. He launched into a rambling discourse on crime and inflation. It had gotten so bad a decent citizen was afraid to go outside even if he could afford to. Worse still, the price of Seagram’s V.O. had just gone up again. I told him to switch to a cheaper brand, and he said he already had, mostly, which was how he was ruining his liver. I told him not to worry, that I’d already put a check into the mail to him, and he said he’d already gotten it. I told him maybe I’d send him another, and I guess he put the phone down to celebrate the news because when he came back on the sandpaper was gone from his voice.

  But all he had to tell me about was Rillington.

  “It turns out he’s quite the young artist,” said Freddy Schwartz. “He’s even had a show out here, you’ll never guess who put it on.” I could, and did. “But what’s more, it turns out him and the Raven dame are all mixed up together. He used to be her student and …”

  “… now they share the same bed,” I finished for him.

  “Well how the hell’d you know that?”

  “Everybody’s doing it, Freddy. So what else you got?”

  “It’s all tying in for you, Cagey. I had to do a lot of digging, and it wasn’t so easy because she’s left the country, but d’you know who’s she’s married to now?”

  “Who’re you talking about? Helen Raven?”

  “Nah, Blumenstock’s widow!”

  I sighed. I had to listen while he told me all about Bernard Lascault and Arts Mondiaux. Then I asked him if that was all.

  “Is that all? Well shit, Cagey, that’s a hell of a lot of thanks! I’ve been running all over town for you, I’ve hardly had an hour’s sleep!”

  I told him he was doing great. Just great. Only there was something else he could do for me. It was just a little thing—a passing suspicion, say, that wouldn’t quite go away.

  He seemed to think it was beneath him, though. All of a sudden he was too tired, too old to run around anymore. Why didn’t I go get a private eye?

  I said I was about to do just that, in Paris. But it ought to be easy for him in L.A. It was just a question of checking passenger lists. If he knew anybody at the airlines, he ought to be able to find out over the telephone.

  He said he didn’t see what difference it made. I said maybe it didn’t make any difference, maybe I was just suspicious by nature. Besides, he said, she was in Paris anyway, wasn’t she? He’d already gotten that for me, hadn’t he?

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “In fact I just saw her.”

  “Well why don’t you ask her?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “Well?”

  There was one of those pregnant pauses.

  “Listen Freddy,” I said, “your check’s made out and the stamps are already dry on the envelope. So cut the shit and just do it for me, will you?”

  “You’re a white man, Cagey,” he said. “I’ll call you back.”

  “You do that,” I said.

  I told him to put in a good word for me in shul, but I think he’d already hung up.

  After that I tried the Lascault number one last time, and by a miracle of modern communications I got through … to Bernard Lascault again, asking me to leave a message after the first beep.

  The concierges of Paris may be legendary gossips, but the two I met that afternoon were about as talkative as a pair of nuns at a circumcision. The first one caught me reading the list of tenants outside her door, on a handsome tree-lined street over in the 15th arrondissement. The gnaw was back in my stomach because the name Lascault was nowhere on the roster. I asked the concierge about him. No, she’d never heard of Monsieur Lascault … until I pressed a ten-franc note into her palm. Then she did know him—the apartment, it
turned out, was registered in another name—but it cost me another ten to find out that he wasn’t there. A third ten brought confirmation that a guest had been using the apartment, yes, a woman, an American, and a fourth that she hadn’t seen the American woman since the morning of the previous day. I went upstairs and checked for myself. There was no sound inside, no answer to the buzzer, and the lock on the door was no ordinary hardware. By that time I’d run out of tens, and when I came back down the concierge was wearing that crafty feather-plucking expression the French get when they spot a pigeon. I handed her a fifty, with my card, and told her that if the American woman came back, she was to guard her with her life until they’d contacted me.

  The second concierge, by contrast, didn’t cost me a centime. This was also in the 15th but a much seedier section of it, where the métro came out of the ground and garbage cans took over from the trees and the music blasting out of the windows was half French rock and half arab singsong. I was a little surprised. I doublechecked the address. It was the one I’d taken off the Renault 5’s registration. In any case, and allowing for it losing in translation, my conversation with the building Madonna went something like this:

  “I’m looking for Monsieur Fleurie, please.”

  “Who?”

  “Monsieur J.-C. Fleurie?” I said, consulting my notebook. “Fleurie, J.-C.? I believe he’s a private investigator?”

  “Not here.”

  “But he lives here, doesn’t he?”

  “Not in.”

  “But could you help me locate him? It’s important.”

  “The office.”

  “The office? Could you tell me where the office is located?”