The Stiff Upper Lip

by Peter Israel

  Amsterdam was Roscoe’s idea. He knew some bloods there who would help them. It was night, though, when they arrived, they didn’t find the bloods till the next morning, finally they spent what was left of the night in an awful fleabag on the Damrak while she called all over Paris—frantically, she said—trying to find out what had happened to me. The next morning—that was yesterday—they’d managed to track down one of the bloods, an itinerant baseketball player called Wallace Edner. This was in a saloon off the Zeedijk. Roscoe went in with his palms up, expecting a great old reunion. Instead they got the fish eye. Wallace Edner wasn’t about to do anything for Brother Roscoe. In fact, all they learned from him was that the word was out: Brother Roscoe was untouchable.

  Roscoe’s notion at this point was to get back on the train and go. Any train anywhere, as far as the money would take him. Would take him, mind you. Because Valérie had done enough for him, it was time for her to get off and for him to do his disappearing number again. Like history repeating itself. Alone.

  Only Valérie wouldn’t buy it. Apparently they’d had quite a scene. In the end it had meant, as she put it, that she had to open a drawer of her life that she’d as soon have kept closed, but the important thing was that now she had Roscoe in a safe place. She couldn’t keep him there forever, but long enough to come get me.

  Which, with the help of a credit card, a rented car, and Bobby H., she’d managed to do.

  It was a nice story, all in all. It even had its poignant moments. Killjoy that I am, though, I had to go and pick some holes in it.

  “Why didn’t you?” I said.

  “Why didn’t I what?”

  “Why didn’t you let him get on the next train and do his disappearing number?”

  She glanced at me. She was driving by this time, talking while she drove. I admired her style behind the wheel.

  “I’m not like that, Cage,” she said.

  “Yeah. It’s too bad, though, in a way. I mean, look at us right now. We’ve got your credit card, we’ve got my credit card, we’ve got wheels. We’ve even got Bobby’s five thousand francs. Between us we could see a lot of Europe before winter.”

  She said that was a beautiful idea. Someday, she said, we were going to do it. She wasn’t going to let me forget.

  “Don’t,” I said. “But suppose then we try another idea on for size. Just suppose it turned out that nobody was out for Roscoe’s skin.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just what I say. Johnny Vee, for instance, and the rest of the California mob. Supposing they couldn’t care less what happened to Roscoe Hadley.”

  She thought about it.

  “I don’t get it,” she said, shaking her head. “Unless it’s your day for bad jokes.”

  “Bad or not,” I said, “this joke happens to be true.”

  She didn’t look at me, but I could see her knuckles blanch on the steering wheel.

  “How do you know it’s true?”

  “I’ve checked it out. Several ways.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  She thought about that too, and I watched her think. She flicked on the left blinker, then pulled out to pass a truck, then veered back into the righthand lane.

  She shook her head. Slowly.

  “I find it hard to believe,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think he’s that good an actor. Roscoe, I mean. Oh, he’s good. But not with me.”

  “That’s what I’d have thought,” I said. “But it doesn’t mean—necessarily—that Roscoe’s been acting.”

  “Oh?”

  “He could have been genuinely scared. He could have thought they really did have a contract out on him. In fact, I think he did.” I paused. “In that case, though, then somebody did a mighty good job of convincing him.”

  She didn’t say anything straight off. She drove. She kept her hands on the wheel and her eyes straight out through the wipers.

  “Who?” she said tensely.

  “Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Didn’t Roscoe as much as tell us himself? It was Brother Odessa. It had to be.”

  I was watching her carefully. Maybe she relaxed a little; maybe she didn’t.

  “But I also thought,” I added, “that it might have been you.”

  It’s a risky business to spring things on people when they’re driving in the rain at 120 kilometers an hour. I mean, you could get killed that way. At that, what kept us from it may have been only that there wasn’t another car on that immediate stretch of Route Nationale. Even so, the Beetle swerved drastically off the road onto the shoulder, then jerked back with a shudder, and our ass end skidded sideways in the wet and out into the oncoming lanes.

  Valérie fought with the wheel. We swerved back, in a blinding spray of mist. A moment later we were back on our own side and charging up the highway. Some fifty meters farther on, though, she eased off on the accelerator. Then she pulled off the road and stopped.

  Her hands were shaking.

  “All right!” she said, glaring at me. Her eyes were dry but small and pointed with anger. “Let’s have the rest of it. Out with it! All of it!”

  “All of what?”

  “I didn’t convince Roscoe of anything! I didn’t set him up for anything! If he was taken in by Odessa, then I was too! But you obviously think otherwise, and if you think otherwise about that, then you obviously think otherwise about a lot of other things!”

  “Maybe I’m just the suspicious type,” I said.

  It didn’t much matter, though, what I said right then. She was off and running, working herself up as she went, and there was no stopping her. There never is, with the good ones. Finally it wasn’t just me and my suspicious nature, it was my gender, ancestry, race, species, all the way back to the unlucky stiff who planted the first apple tree.

  It was something to experience all right. Her eyes blazed, her body arched, and the very air crackled with her anger. But it was pretty clear too that if I’d asked the wrong question, I’d touch the right nerve.

  The storm died down, as storms will.

  She lit a cigarette, then stubbed it out. Then lit another one. This one stayed lit.

  “O.K.,” I said, “let’s do it your way. Out with it. Cards on the table. Right?”

  “All right.”

  “Then let’s start with Dédé Delatour.”

  She bit at her upper lip.

  “He’s a salaud, Cage,” she said tersely. She’d called me that too, in her run-down on my character, but, the French language being short on obscenity, salaud has to cover the whole gamut from louse to mother-raper.

  “So I found out,” I said. “He spoke very highly of you too.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He called you a resourceful bitch, among other things. I got the impression you know each other pretty well.”

  She looked away.

  “We did,” she said. “Once. It was through him, in fact, that … all right, that I met Roscoe. The trouble with Dédé’ is that he likes to think he owns people. Like toys. When it doesn’t work out that way, he’s like a child.”

  “A child? Pretty vicious for a child, if you ask me.”

  “Children can be vicious too.”

  “And naive?”

  “Naïve?” she said questioningly. “In what way?”

  “Well, I spent a pretty bad night, courtesy of Dédé Delatour. There was one thing, though, that I still can’t figure out. From the minute I met him, he had me pegged as the hit man who’d been assigned to Roscoe. I was supposed to get Roscoe, and he couldn’t understand what was taking me so long. He was so sure of it, he hadn’t even bothered to check it out. Now, doesn’t that sound pretty naïve?”

  She was working at the lip again.

  “All right,” she said tersely. “I told him.”

  “You told him what?”

  “That you’d been hired to get Roscoe.”

  “Jesus
Christ!”

  “I had to, Cage. He wanted to know what you were doing, hanging around Roscoe.”

  “And he believed you?”

  “He had every reason to. I’d already been to him before. When I first found out Roscoe was in trouble. I went to see him. I told him the. whole story. I begged him to stop it”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said there wasn’t anything he could do, not even if he wanted to. He said his relationship with the people in America was entirely business, that he couldn’t intervene. Besides …”

  She faltered, then caught herself.

  “He laughed at me,” she said flatly. “He said it would be good for me. That it would teach me a lesson.”

  I could picture the scene. I didn’t much enjoy it.

  “So when Delatour turned you down, you went job-hunting?”

  “That’s right”

  “And came to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And after that you told him I was the hit man from California?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” I said. “Didn’t it occur to you that he could check it out just by picking up the telephone?”

  “It occurred to me. But I didn’t think he would.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “For one thing, I can be persuasive. For another …”

  “For another?”

  She sucked air again, and her lips went white, but she kept her eyes on mine.

  “There were things going on that he didn’t want them to know about.”

  “Ahhh. Like what kinds of things?”

  “Drugs,” she said. “As far as the California people knew, it was just basketball.”

  “You mean the players he was hiring from Johnny Vee were doing a little moonlighting off the court and he didn’t want Johnny Vee to know it?”

  “What’s moonlighting?”

  I explained.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Some of them were. They traveled a lot, they made a lot of money at it” She shrugged. “It was easy money. No one got caught.”

  “What about Roscoe?”

  “No,” she said sharply. “That was just the point. Roscoe didn’t want any part of it. He knew it was going on, but he’d always refused. That was one reason Dédé wouldn’t lift a finger for him.”

  “I think you’re wrong.”

  “I’m not wrong,” she insisted.

  “Maybe he didn’t do it for Delatour,” I said. “But he did for Odessa.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  I told her about Bobet then, and what he’d said. She took the news hard. This surprised me. I mean, she’d been around enough, I’d have thought, not to have too many illusions left. I even found myself defending Roscoe to her. Odessa Grimes may have started out moonlighting for Delatour, but the way it looked to me, he’d branched off into business for himself. And having done so, he’d recruited Roscoe by the sweetest kind of shakedown: (1) Johnny Vee had a contract out for him; (2) he, Odessa, was going to protect him against all comers; (3) therefore he, Roscoe, owed Odessa a small favor or two, like carrying some stuff around for him in his hand luggage. Then, when Odessa had gotten sliced, it was no wonder Roscoe had started jumping at shadows. Had he been there, chances were he’d have gotten it too. Furthermore, the murder had Jeannof’s signature written all over it, so that when the stake-out Valérie had lured into the Neuilly apartment turned out to be another of Delatour’s hands, there’d been nothing left for Roscoe to do but run like hell.

  This was, I thought, a pretty fair piece of analysis. It plugged up most of the holes, and all of them as far as Valérie was concerned. But it was wrong in one important respect, and if I’d realized it then, maybe I’d have managed to convince her to take that Grand Tour of Europe then and there.

  Instead, I reached across her.

  She put her hand on my arm.

  “Please, Cage,” she said. “I can’t drive any more. Not right now.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “Right now I just want to listen to the news.”

  I’d caught the tail end of the bulletins the previous hour, while she was sleeping. I hadn’t been paying attention at first, and I’d missed most of it. Now we heard it all. It was a testament to something or other, I suppose, that the still-unsolved murder of the black American basketball star had been shoved back near the weather report. As far as that went, the police were still looking for one Roscoe Hadley and following up numerous leads. But the French police, narcotics division, were also questioning another basketball player, also black, also American, who was being held in Barcelona, Spain, on a charge of transporting drugs. L’Office Centrale de la Répression du Trafic Illicite des Stupéfiantes was maintaining an official silence concerning the affair, but, according to informed speculation the athlete in question was part of a dope-smuggling ring.

  So much, I thought, for Bobet’s “in strictest confidence.”

  Even this story, though, had been pushed aside by a more sensational event. According to the announcer, Paris hadn’t known a night like the night before since the worst underworld wars of the fifties. Shortly after midnight, when Montmartre was at its liveliest, a group of unidentified gunmen had literally invaded a well-known café and brasserie on Place Clichy and, before the terrorized eyes of the numerous clientèle and staff, had brazenly shot and killed four men and gravely wounded two others. The six victims, all of whom had been identified, were known to have underworld connections. The brasserie had been sealed, and the Anti-Gang Brigade of the Paris police had been called in to spearhead the investigation.

  “It’s a wonder,” I said, “that they’ve got anybody left to look for us.”

  “Who?”

  “The Paris Law. Do you know any of the victims?”

  “No.”

  “Never heard of any of them?”

  She hadn’t. Neither had I. Probably they weren’t Delatour’s. On the other hand, it could have been Delatour’s who’d done the shooting.

  There was the weather too. It was raining everywhere in France, the announcer said, except on the Côte d’Azur. A low-pressure zone had extended over the continent from the Atlantic, and the rain was expected to continue all day, with average temperatures dropping below the seasonal norms.

  I switched the radio off. We sat there, listening to the rain plip-plipping on the Beetle’s roof. Every so often a car went by, spraying us with water. Nobody paid us any mind.

  “Cards on the table,” Valérie said. “I’ve told you everything, Cage. There’s nothing left out.”

  “O.K.,” I said, my hand on the door handle. “I’m going to drive now. We’d better get going.”

  “There’s just one thing,” she said, reaching toward me.

  She was smiling, around the eyes as well as the mouth. Her tongue licked across her upper lip.

  It was like her, I realized, to up the ante when you least expected it.

  “I want to fuck you,” she said.

  “Now? Here?”

  “Now. Here.”

  An improbable proposition. I mean: a rain-swept road in the middle of nowhere, a rented Beetle with a stick shift on the floor, and she having just made a confession which, as far as I could tell, had cost her.

  I grinned at her.

  “That’s a beautiful idea too,” I said. “And I wont let you forget it either. Right now, though, I think we’d better go talk to Brother Roscoe.”

  11

  We went out of France at the corner of the Belgian border where the little duchy of Luxembourg tucks into the picture. This was a tip from Bobby H., in case anyone was looking for us, and, what with the weather, it turned out to be a good one. The last representative of the French Republic didn’t so much as come out of his booth to say hello. He just looked up and motioned us through.

  We picked up the autoroute again near Liège and rolled across Belgium without stopping. Which was just as wel
l. From what I’ve seen of it, the land of the Walloons and the Flemings is a bastard place, half French and half Dutch, with the best of each left out. But Holland is something else, and if Holland is something else, then Amsterdam, friend, is one of the last of the great towns. The travel hucksters like to call it the Venice of the North, but according to Cage’s Pleasure Guide to the Old Continent, the Venetians would have to work a hundred years to make their town as civilized as the inner city of the burghers.

  As it happened, though, we didn’t get near enough to Amsterdam that day to wave. We were headed for a pocket-sized Dutch fairyland to the south of it, off the road to The Hague and the North Sea resort of Scheveningen. I call it a fairyland simply because it’s hard to believe people still live in places like that. I mean private citizens like you and me. I know some of the French châteaux are still inhabited, and Nico van den Luyken’s domain could have fit into a corner, say, of Vaux-le-Vicomte. But the French châteaux-dwellers—the two-legged ones, that is—are, for the most part, doddering aristocrats who live in one room because that’s all they can afford to heat, whereas Nico van den Luyken’s domain included a functioning windmill, expanses of orchard, a model dairy farm, and a stone-and-brick manse that, even in the rain, put the third little pig to shame.

  To top it all off. he ran the joint at a profit.

  I’ve said that Valérie had had to reopen a drawer of her life on Roscoe’s account. The drawer, apparently, contained Nicholas van den Luyken. The image is wrong, though. Nico van den Luyken would have taken up the whole cupboard. He was a tall, ruddy, and efficient-looking Dutchman with a shock of auburn hair speckled with gray and beard to match, plus a grip you weren’t about to forget. He spoke impeccable English. He had the self-assured manner of his class and surroundings that made you feel like you’d somehow missed the boat. He was discreet about it, though, to the point that once he’d seen to it that we had a bath, fresh clothes, and a drink, he left us alone with Roscoe, saying only that dinner would be served whenever we wanted it.

  When I came downstairs, I found Roscoe alone in Nico’s living room. He didn’t fit the image either, at least not the one I’d formed mentally. He was sprawled in a low couch, a tumbler of orange juice beside him, with his legs stretched out toward a crackling fire, and reading the European edition of Newsweek under an arching stainless-steel lamp. The threads he had on were Nico’s, and they fit him amazingly well: pressed flannel trousers, a thick natural-wool turtleneck, and a hound’s-tooth tweed jacket that had a Bond Street look. The only anachronism was his footgear: Adidas sneakers, white with blue stripes. The sartorial resources of the estate, I guessed, didn’t go as far as Roscoe’s shoe size. But. beholding him, a Martian touring the Earth for the first time could only have said: “What’s that you were telling me about the oppressed black peoples?”