The Stiff Upper Lip

by Peter Israel

  Leduc’s voice cracked out like thunder. He half rose out of his chair.

  What Valérie said to him then, hissing the words, brought him the rest of the way to his feet.

  Valérie’s guard seized her from behind, tipping her chair back, and when I started forward, my windpipe ran into a forearm of steel. I went back too, in mid-air, while Leduc crossed the intervening space.

  He moved with surprising quickness. Valérie kicked out at him, but knocked her leg aside and, stepping inside it, reached down and grabbed a handful of breast through her sweater.

  I saw him wrench. I heard her gasp, cry out.

  He let go. His chest was heaving. He stepped back and turned to me.

  “You lied to the Chinaman,” he said. “The documents don’t exist!”

  It came out a statement, not a question, and the black glare followed from deep inside his skull.

  I couldn’t speak. At a nod from Leduc, the forearm relaxed its pressure. I felt the floor under my feet again.

  “It doesn’t matter what I say now, does it?” I answered. “Maybe they exist, maybe they don’t, but how will you be able to tell whether I’m telling the truth? There’s only one sure way for you to find out, Loulou.”

  The forearm struck again. I guess the muscle didn’t like hearing the boss addressed by his nickname. But Leduc waved him off.

  “You like to live dangerously,” he said to me. “But either way, the black doesn’t know enough about our operations to hurt us.”

  “No? Well, maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t, but that would be for the Law to judge, wouldn’t it? And the press? It would depend, for one thing, on how much Grimes might have told him, if you see what I mean. But that’s not the point, not at all. Don’t you see?”

  I leaned forward as far as I could get and raised my voice.

  “You just decided—all of you—to get Delatour. A unanimous vote, isn’t that right? And maybe you can, probably you can, even though Delatour’s no shrinking violet. But a lot of people are likely to get killed in the bargain, and who’s to say it’ll end there? I never knew anybody worth a damn in your business who took needless risks, and if you ask me, you’re about to take a monumental one. Whereas if you let Hadley do it for you, let him spill what he knows to the Law, they’d have enough on Delatour and his gang to put them on ice till we’re all dead and buried.”

  I had more to say than that and they let me say it all. I did it big. It was like I was on a free-throw line with the score tied and time run out. The crowd was on its feet and Rosco on the bench. It was up to Cage now. Now or never.

  Only somehow I still held the ball in my hands. The longer I held it, the heavier it got. And when I was done talking, it was like a sphere full of mud.

  The thing was: I’d been banking on being able to feed Delatour to the wolves and on the wolves being satisfied. Let Roscoe sing to the Law, let the Law hang Delatour, let Leduc’s operations continue as before. All of which would depend, obviously, on how much influence Leduc had going for him.

  But when I’d finished, Leduc spoke out, cold-eyed.

  “You’re too late with that now,” he said.

  And that was all he said. And then he snapped his fists apart, like he was breaking a stick of wood.

  What chilled my blood even more doesn’t come through in English. French, like a lot of other languages, has two ways of saying “you.” One is tu, the other is vous. Vous is what you say in normal conversation. Tu is what the grammar books call the “intimate” form. That means you can use it in bed. But tu is also used in other I’m-on-top, you’reon-the-bottom situations. French parents, for instance, use it in talking to their children, and French masters to their servants, and the French generally to Ayrabs and blackamoors. And executioners, presumably, in that tender moment near the end when they ask their victim if they’ve any last requests.

  What I’m getting at is that Loulou Leduc had used it on me.

  15

  Maybe it’s the instinct for self-preservation, maybe the proverbial optimism of Americans, but I’ve always had trouble believing somebody would actually order up my extinction. Sure I’ve been in combat, and you could argue that the poor slobs shooting at me had been ordered to by some general in a war room with his finger on the map. But the general in question had slant eyes and yellow skin, and his target wasn’t me, Cage, but anything that was white and moved. I’ve also been in man-on-man situations a few times where death by violence, mine or his, was a logical possibility, and once or twice I was plain lucky. But that somebody in power, somebody who’d laid eyes on me and talked to me in human conversation, could actually point the finger, saying, “That one, kill him,” and mean me, Cage, B. F., and not the guy down the street …

  No. No way.

  I came as close, though, to believing it that day as I ever have. We’d been a source of embarrassment to them. Alive, we’d continue to be. It didn’t matter in this sense how much we knew, or how little. Dédé Delatour was to be eliminated, quickly and violently, bullets were going to fly and blood spill, and three more corpses in the body count wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of difference.

  In other words, the source of embarrassment would be removed. And when it comes to the mob, be it U.S. or French or Pakistani, there’s only one way they go about such things.

  After my exchange with Leduc, Verucci began to summarize the solutions that had been proposed in our regard. The one suggested by their American colleague merited particular attention, in his opinion. There were several other possibilities, but …

  At this point, though, Leduc cut him off.

  “Get them out of here,” he ordered peremptorily.

  I expected us to be separated again. Then, when they stuck us in the empty room at the other end of the hallway, with armed muscle between us and the door, I thought we’d be called back to hear the verdict. But it didn’t happen like that. Instead, we sat there on the bare floorboards, waiting, listening.

  While Valérie hugged her knees.

  And our star witness kept his back to the wall, his feet splayed out in front of him.

  And the muscle sat on straight chairs.

  And I tried to guess their American colleague’s solution.

  After a while, we swapped stories.

  Valérie’s, it turned out, was little different from mine. They’d taken her as soon as Wallace Edner and I left the Zeedijk bar, two men with guns and a car waiting outside. She’d been blindfolded too, part of the time, and Johnny Vee had worked her over personally in ways she didn’t want to talk about. It damn near broke her up that she hadn’t caught on about the depositions. What she’d said, on the spot, was that she didn’t know anything about them. Later on, she’d been transported to Paris the same way I had, coffee included. She thought it had still been light outside when they left Amsterdam, but she wasn’t sure.

  Roscoe had been lifted right out of Nico’s house, in broad daylight. The trouble was that there, on the floor of that empty room, he went into another non-remembering phase. It was like the stuffing had been knocked out of him and something else besides, and what was left you could only call a reversion to the nigger mentality: the idea that the honkies had fucked him over again, present company included, and not for the first time, and probably not for the last. About all we got out of him was that, either by design or accident, they’d grabbed him when Nico wasn’t there. They’d come fast too, like it had been planned. That, and that the one who’d done the job on him later was also Johnny Vee.

  The California sportsman, it seemed, had had a full day.

  There was a ray of hope, though, in what Roscoe said, for people looking for rays of hope. That was Nico. I was pretty sure he’d have made the call to Frèrejean, given the chance. But I had no way of knowing if he’d been given the chance.

  Time passed.

  We heard people coming and going in the apartment.

  At some point in the afternoon, the muscle guarding us were replaced by other muscle.


  Meanwhile, we were still alive. I wasn’t sure why, but by and by I began to get used to the idea, and the more I got used to it, the better I liked it. Call that self-preservation if you want to, but it started the adrenalin flowing again.

  Sometimes, like I said, you take what you can get.

  It was late afternoon when they took us down in the elevator, one by one.

  We all met again, downstairs.

  The car was a Pontiac, made in U.S.A., and about as inconspicuous on the Paris streets as a battleship on the Seine. The doors were open on the sidewalk side. There was a driver already behind the wheel, and one of the muscle in the back seat. He kept a cannon trained on me as I crossed the sidewalk.

  Johnny Vee was standing next to the Pontiac. His jacket was open too. He was wearing twin chest holsters.

  “All the comforts of home,” I said to him, nodding at the Pontiac. “Where’re we going, Johnny Boy?”

  “Yours to find out, punk,” he answered. “Get in.”

  Valérie and Roscoe sat up front with the driver, Vale’rie in the middle. Roscoe had a deterrent at the back of his neck. Johnny’s muscle held it. Johnny himself, in the middle of the back seat, held another one on me. This left Valérie unguarded, but, sandwiched as she was, she had no place to go.

  We came out of the 18th Arrondissement and back onto the Périphérique. The sun had made a big try earlier in the day, but now the sky was gray again, uniformly. The air was cold, the light fading, the traffic fierce. It drove us off the Périphérique finally and onto the so-called Boulevards des Maréchaux. Before the Périphérique was built, these boulevards themselves constituted the outer rim of Paris, and though they make one long circling road, every few blocks the name changes. Ney, Soult, Poniatowski, Kellerman, Jourdan—all reminders of those nobler Napoleonic days when France used to win its share of the battles.

  We made better progress on the boulevards, even with the traffic lights. Then, somewhere near the Bois de Vincennes, Valérie started working on Johnny Vee.

  I’d already felt the tension building in him. Maybe he was a general, newly appointed, in the hierarchy of the mob, but right then in the Pontiac, weaving through Paris traffic on unfamiliar streets, he was no better off than a G.I. in No Man’s Land. Any minute the bugles were going to blow, the booby-traps explode, and Johnny Vee was going to have to execute without thinking. His adrenalin was up, his concentration narrowed. At times like that, you don’t want to think, much less talk, and the last thing you want is to be rattled.

  So Valérie set about rattling him.

  “What do you think, Cage?” she started in from the front seat. “Where do you think we’re going?” Then, when I didn’t answer right off: “Why do you think Johnny Boy doesn’t want to tell us? It’s pretty obvious to me, isn’t it to you?”

  “I think we’re going to Dédé’s,” I said, joining in. “The scenic southern route.”

  “That’s what I think too. I think all six of us are going to pay Dédé a visit. And Johnny Boy’s going to try to trade us in exchange for a cease-fire. Isn’t that the idea, Johnny Boy?”

  Johnny Vee said nothing.

  “You sold out on Dédé, didn’t you, Johnny?” she went on. “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”

  “Shut up,” he said. “Shut your cunt’s mouth.”

  “If you ask me, Cage,” Valérie said, “they’re scared to death of Dédé. Dédé’s in a killing mood. That’s why Loulou had to call for help, all the way to California. But Johnny Boy doesn’t know what he’s gotten into, do you, Johnny? This is Paris, not Hollywood. You may have picked the wrong side. If you ask me, Johnny, you’d better try a cease-fire.”

  “Shut her up, Cage,” said Johnny Vee hoarsely. “Tell her to shut her goddam yap.”

  “What makes you think I can shut her up?” I said.

  “Because it’s thanks to her, punk, that you’re still alive,” he blurted through his teeth. “If it was up to me, you’d never have gotten out of Amsterdam.”

  An illogical answer to the question, but what do you know?

  I caught Valérie’s eyes searching for mine in the rear-view. We locked in.

  “How do you figure that one out, Val?” I asked her.

  “It’s easy,” she said, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “It’s because of my father, Maître Merchadier, have you heard the name, Johnny? They told you about him, didn’t they? One of the most powerful men in France. Let me tell you, Johnny, if anything happens to me, he’ll never let you out of Paris alive. He’ll have your private parts cut off and served with the hors d’oeuvres. You’d better believe that.”

  How much of what she said was truth and how much bravado I couldn’t say. It had a certain logic to it, though. In the carnage at hand, the mob could have disposed of me and Roscoe with relative impunity. But maybe not Valérie.

  In any case, she’d read his mentality right on the button.

  I could see his jaws working out of the corner of my eye. He jammed his gun into my ribs, at the same time yelling at the muscle next to him to shut her up.

  The muscle shifted his gun from Roscoe, but for a minute it was like he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with it.

  This left Roscoe momentarily free, and my body stiffened in antiipcation. Let’s do it, man! I shouted at him in my mind. Grab the fucking gun!

  Only Roscoe wasn’t grabbing anything.

  He sat there, gray-faced. Like he hadn’t heard.

  When I glanced back at the rearview, Valérie’s eyes were gone. They stayed gone. We went over the river and, still keeping to the boulevards, circled across the Left Bank. The traffic thinned some. We crossed the Avenue de la Porte d’Italie and stopped for a red light.

  Johnny Vee told the driver to get us moving. The driver told him about the red light, in approximate English. Johnny Vee told him to fuck the red light. The driver shrugged, and with a jerk the Pontiac burst across the intersection.

  Where was the goddam Law? I wondered.

  But then, suddenly, it was too late for the Law.

  Too late for Roscoe too, and Valérie’s needle.

  At the top of the Parc Montsouris, we pulled in to the curb. A man was waiting for us on the sidewalk in front of the Métro building that sits on top of the Cité Universitaire station. He had his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. He walked around in front of the car, and the driver hit the button that rolled down his window.

  “You’re behind schedule,” the man said in French.

  The driver answered him in French. It was the traffic, he explained. They exchanged a few more words, then the man stood out in the traffic, blocking it, and waved us through.

  “What did he say?” Johnny Vee asked tensely.

  “He said we are behind schedule,” the driver answered. “Everything is in place. We can go right ahead.”

  We rolled up to the end of the park and turned down the street that runs alongside it. Nobody was saying anything. You could feel it all right. The bugles were going to blow, a thousand bugles, and then Johnny Vee, in a strident voice that didn’t sound like it belonged to him, started telling us what was about to happen.

  16

  Mention gang wars in Paris and right away the French think Chicago. It’s a knee-jerk reaction, like they’ve seen too many reruns of The Untouchables. As far as Chicago goes, I’ve never been there and I’m in no hurry, but I doubt Al Capone, ever mobilized an army, complete with weaponry, such as went into action behind us that cold fall dusk.

  I’ve already described Didier Delatour’s hideaway: a handsome, ivy-covered house on a narrow, cobbled street of ivy-covered houses, with a back garden surrounded by a spiked fence that let out on another similar street. The area it’s in forms a roughly triangular wedge, bounded by the Pare Montsouris, the Montsouris reservoir, and the big University of Paris hospital. By the time we got there, every exit hole had been plugged except ours. The Pontiac took care of that one all by itself, but just to make sure, th
ere were two cars that pulled out from the curb behind us and blocked off the street once we’d turned in. There was just no way Delatour was going to get out alive, short of tunneling through to China.

  The tactical problem was how the attackers were going to get in. Quickly and painlessly. A Paris house is built to resist intrusion. There are metal shutters that go across the windows, the walls are of stone or brick, the front doors are barricaded with various ingenious and allegedly burglar-proof devices. Nor was Dédé Delatour the type, given the circumstances, to play knock-knock-who’s-there.

  This was where Johnny Vee’s “solution” came in.

  It mayn’t have been much of a plan, and I never did learn what he thought would happen if the first half of it worked. But it did have a certain element of surprise.

  The surprise, very simply, was us.

  Whereas if it failed, well, I guess that was part of the solution.

  “You’re taking us in, punk,” said Johnny Vee. “The three of you. You’re gonna get out of the car, you and the cunt and Cleever, you’re gonna walk up to the front door, you’re gonna ring the fucking bell.”

  “Suppose nobody’s home,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about that, wise guy. And don’t try to pull anything. There’ll be enough guns behind you to kill you ten times over. You walk up there and you ring the fucking bell. You try to pull anything and you’re dead. Now let’s go.”

  We were rolling slowly up the street. I remember thinking: What happens when they open the door? Maybe I even said it. I didn’t have to, though. If and when the door opened, all hell would break loose. It would be every man for himself, the bugles blowing and the artillery blazing, and three people I knew were going to get caught in the crossfire. So why not at least make it four?

  By this time we’d pulled up in front of the house.

  “Get out!” said Johnny Vee. “You, Cleever, you and the cunt! Out! You walk around the front of the car, nice and easy.” Then, to the muscle next to him: “Get out and cover them.”

  The two side doors opened. Roscoe got out, without resistance. And Valérie, and the muscle behind them.