The French Kiss

by Peter Israel

  The light switched from red to green, but J.-C. Fleurie kept his foot on the brake.

  “There’s someone waiting for you inside,” he said.

  His eyes didn’t move, but there was only one possibility: a well-lit café on the corner.

  I got out.

  I was expecting a man, but that only goes to show how much I’d forgotten his methods. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been aswirl in chiffon and the tawny-blond had been piled majestically on her head. Now, as she hurried through the swinging door of the café, it was down, one side of it stuck inside the turned-up collar of her coat. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and she looked tired, like she’d just gotten out of bed. Maybe she had. Not that it did her any harm, and there was nothing you could say against that loyal magnolia smile.

  She looked nervously past me, down the dark sidewalk. I heard the grind of gears behind me and turning, saw the 403 pull away from the curb. The small red taillights disappeared into the traffic.

  “Come on, Cage,” she said, linking her arm into mine.

  “Where’re we going, Susie? Another party?”

  “Never mind. We’re late.”

  “Late for what?”

  The Giulia was only a short walk away in the Hôtel de Ville underground parking, but by way of an answer she steered me across the street and, with one last glance around us, down into the métro.

  I should say in passing that I’ve nothing against the Paris subway, nothing particularly for it either. People who know about such things claim it’s got it all over New York and London, and to judge from the number of bums who sleep on the benches and the gypsies and hippies panhandling in the corridors, there must be those who find it downright homey. On the other hand, no right-thinking Parisian would be caught alive in it, and to a lad who grew up on the shores of the Pacific and has gotten around all his life on his own four wheels, there’s something pretty weird about hurtling through a hole in the ground in an overheated tin tube jammed with thousands of sweating humanity, most of them worshippers of Allah.

  Looking later on a map, I saw that the route we took described a long jagged oval, with a couple of train changes along the way at what the French call correspondences, whereas we could have gotten there with just a short zig and a zag. For this there might have been two reasons: one, to spot and lose whoever might have tried to come along for the ride; the other, to bring us into a particular station in just the right way. But only the first occurred to me at the time. Before we got off a train, Susan Smith would squeeze my arm and rubberneck in either direction, then, satisfied, grab my hand and rush us down the passageways to the next platform. We were the last ones to get on and the first ones off, and though I don’t know what she’d have done if she spotted a tail, no, there was no tail. There was just us.

  We got off finally on a station platform somewhere on one of the lines that runs out of the République. By then I was completely turned around in my mind and my shirt was sticking to my back. I noticed the inevitable bum sleeping on a bench, and the same blue sign at one end with the white arrow and the white SORTIE for the exit. Only there was no yellow CORRESPONDENCE sign to go with it. Meaning that this was a local stop, and the only way out was up to the street.

  Susan Smith took my hand and led me down the platform. I realized she’d made a mistake. The handful of other passengers who’d gotten off had already passed us, heading toward the exit. In our direction was only the closed end of the station.

  But she hadn’t made a mistake, and the bum on the bench wasn’t sleeping. In fact he wasn’t on the bench any more either. When Susan Smith let go my hand, he was right behind me and that wasn’t a tin cup he was holding in his hand.

  “You’re late, ole buddy,” he said.

  “Sorry about that, Al,” I answered, stopping in my tracks. “I was unavoidably detained.”

  The train we’d come on was pulling away. I glimpsed the faces of a few people standing in the last car. The platform on the other side was empty except for a series of king-sized billboards advertising some lotion you were supposed to spread on your baby’s ass.

  “It doesn’t matter, Cagey,” said Al Dove. “We’ve got plenty of time. Just keep walking nice and easy. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

  ELEVEN

  Another thing I’ve learned about the Paris métro: they’ve been modernizing it in a hurry. To a large extent this has meant getting rid of people. The old red and green trains took two men to run them; the new ones go on rubber wheels and they’re computer-directed. The ticket punchers are gone, replaced by automatic magnetic readers, and the minor stations are now designed in the off-hours to be staffed by a single employee, who sits upstairs behind bars selling tickets. Of course the security may not be what it used to be, but then, so they tell me, Paris isn’t Chicago, and besides, there’s a convenient alarm button located on each platform for the rape victims.

  This made it just about right for Al Dove, and cheaper in addition. After he sent Susan Smith on her way, he pointed me to a small boothlike affair down near the closed end of the station. It was big enough for two, three in a pinch. A small desk, a couple of wood chairs, a bulletin board with yellowed notices tacked to it, a telephone. A radiator that hissed and gurgled and put out enough heat to melt a hole in the Arctic Circle. The upper half of the booth’s partitions were glass, but anyone who spotted us would have taken us for two métro featherbedders putting in their time, and whenever a new train pulled in, the artillery Al Dove held in his lap discouraged me from any notions I might have had about waving to my friends.

  The artillery looked secondhand. So for that matter did Al Dove. It wasn’t only the clothes or the dark stubble on his cheeks. The wind, as Bernard Lascault might have said, had gone out of his poupe, and the spark and movement from his eyes. They stared straight out in a kind of tired fixation that made you all the more conscious of the tics and tremors around them. It was the boxer’s look when the bell’s about to ring and he knows the worst is to come. Or the high roller’s in the early morning, when the dice have gone cold. I’d seen it before maybe, but a long time before, back when the last of the funky summers ground to a halt on a pair of gamblers’ stools in Reno, Nevada. But in those days, to a couple of underage, kicks-surfeited studs, the worst the future could hold was a helmet and a uniform. Whereas in an overheated Paris métro, a couple of decades later …

  Well, maybe all I mean to say is that Al Dove looked like he needed the gun.

  Once inside the booth, he shook me down. I was clean. My musket, as far as I know, is still gathering dust in a drawer in Santa Monica. Then we sat, just a few feet apart, on the same side of the small desk, Al Dove with his back to the doorway and me facing him, looking at the gun, and him, and the empty tracks behind him.

  The radiator cooked the rivulets which ran down my back.

  And Al Dove stared at me, empty-eyed.

  “It’s a fucking shame,” he said. “We should’ve been working together, baby. We always should’ve been. At least you can’t say I never tried.”

  That too: an old refrain.

  “Sure, Al,” I said. “Like the last time we talked, you said you owed me one, that you were paying back a debt and then we’d be quits. Remember? And then your strong boy coldcocked me.”

  I’d have expected him to grin at me and come back with some wisecrack.

  “Got to hand it to you, Cagey. I told Jonnie to put you out. Not for the count, but long enough to keep you out of our hair. He knows his business too, and Helen said you were out cold. Your skull must be as hard as Mt. Rushmore.” The grin came then, but a slight and tired one. “What did you do with him? Buy him a one-way ticket to L.A.?”

  What he was saying made no sense to me at first. Only then it began to—in a way I didn’t like to think about.

  “Secrets of the trade,” I answered.

  “Secrets of the trade. But you had help too, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I had help.”

  “
I figured. Cagey’s army. The minute I heard you were there, at the studio, I knew I had trouble. Hell, I knew it the minute I laid eyes on you. More trouble than I’d bargained for. I think I could have handled the rest of them, the dirty bastards. Even then. But Binty had a better idea.”

  “Binty’s always had better ideas.”

  “Yeah. She sent you in, and you found the studio, and all of a sudden I had to be in two places at once. Whichever I picked, it was bound to be wrong. Helen and Bill got out in time, and I managed to get what I wanted out of the gallery, but it was too late for the rest of the stuff by the time I got to the studio. You were already gone, and Jonnie, and the joint cleaned out.”

  He paused. I was thinking: but I wasn’t gone, you dumb bastard, all you had to do was look upstairs.

  “How’d she do it this time, Cagey?” he went on. “With her checkbook or her cunt? Never mind. She was always pretty good with it, and you were never one to say no, were you? Like all last night, honh? Well, we’ve both been there, baby, and we’ve both been had. Only for me it’s been for the last time. What about you?”

  I didn’t reply. All of a sudden there were too many questions running through my head. Like the one I’d asked Freddy Schwartz, which hadn’t been answered. Like why Al Dove didn’t know what had happened to Jonnie Davis. Like how come all I was supposed to do with Al Dove was fix him, and then she’d …?

  “Remember Denise?” said Al Dove softly.

  The grin moved momentarily back into his eyes, then out. A train entered the station on the far side, soft-shoeing in the rubber wheels, then another one on ours. A few people got off each time, and through the window of the partition I could see them straggling toward the exit. Not a one so much as glanced at us. At first I didn’t remember Denise. Then I did. Normally Denise might have made me laugh too, if a little ruefully, but I caught the reference behind Denise and the half-plea that might have gone with it, and then other images started getting in the way. Like palm trees blowing in the wind. Only they were bending now, arching their necks, and the wind starting to whistle in the fronds.

  “Look Al,” I said. “You went to some trouble to get me here. I doubt it was just to reminisce about old times. You’re the one handling the artillery. You’d better tell me what you want.”

  He glanced down at his lap. His right hand clasped the gun laxly. It was only a few feet away from me. There was a chance I could have taken it from him. There was also a chance he wanted me to try.

  “It’s not too late for us to make a deal, Cagey.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “The way it stands now, nobody’s got anything. We’ve both tried to get our hands on what the other guy has, and we’ve both struck out. Enough’s enough. Though I must say, ole buddy, I wouldn’t’ve thought you’d have bothered with Fleurie’s man. It’s not your style. Well, but I guess times have changed. Else she’s got her hooks into you deeper than I’d’ve thought …”

  The grin had come back again, a sly one, and the needle into his voice.

  “I’m clean on that score,” I said. “The Law …”

  “Sure, the Law. Same old cagey Cage. I bet you’ve got an alibi a yard long too.”

  “A yard long, Al.”

  “A yard long. Well, let me tell it like it is, friend. We’ve stopped running. The rats are cornered. We’re where you’d never think of looking, not in a million years …” Here his voice dropped almost to a whisper. “… but if you did … well, next time, Cagey, you’d better bring your army with you.”

  It hung there in the overheated air, the menace along with the trace of plea.

  “What kind of deal, Al,” I repeated.

  He hesitated. Then, with a shrug:

  “There are two deals, Cagey. Like I say, it’s a standoff right now. On my side, I’ve got one great picture and I’ve got Helen Raven. But no buyer. Whereas on yours, you’ve got two … well, let’s say you’ve got two pictures. And you’ve the buyer and sure, you could try peddling them to her and take what you can get. Only the way I figure it, you haven’t tried yet. And maybe with good reason, honh?”

  The grin again.

  “Have you doped it out yet, Cagey? Or only suspected? I mean, who do you think painted them? Do you think Blumenstock did? Not that anyone could tell the difference, not even an expert. They’re good all right, and he had the right materials and sketches to work from. Try to prove it! Hell, she didn’t even tell me till after we’d signed!”

  The grin turned to laughter. Then the laughter went away. He was waiting for me to say something.

  “The thing is, Cagey, you put it all together and they’ll still be worth two million francs, and that’d be cheap the way things go these days. Three Blumenstocks for two million? It’s practically a bargain! If Cookie smells a rat, not that she should, but Lascault could still do that well on the open market. At least that well. Or without Lascault! Hell, who needs Paris? There’s Japan, there’s the Middle East. It’s America’s revenge, baby! What’s more …”

  He went on with it, working himself up as he went. I let him go. I watched him while he talked and I heard the words, but my mind was heating up in a hurry inside. He’s got some property that belongs to us, she’d said. It hadn’t even occurred to me that the property was split, and she hadn’t seen fit to tell me. And why was that? Turn it around as I might, I could only come up with one answer: she didn’t want me to know. Just find him, fix him, she’d said, and I’ll take care of it then. And why didn’t she want me to know? He’s scared to death of you, she’d said. Kiss me, she’d said. Kiss me again.

  Al Dove was laying it on me now, and I heard him and I didn’t hear. Because the palms were bending and scrunching their necks and the storm rolling toward them, the waves rising and crashing, the lightning screeching across the bloody sky like chalk on a giant blackboard. And Al Dove was telling me that together we could do it. He knew where the pictures were as well as I did now. Lascault’s place in L’lsle-Adam, where else? That’s where Fleurie’s man had been headed. He’d go himself, now that he knew where, only he didn’t want to share the same fate. But together, the two of us, sure we could pull it off. Because the Blumenstock setup was intact, that was the beauty of it. They’d ripped off the rest of his operation, had they? Well, they were welcome to it. But three pictures for two million or more, and Lascault could be brought around once it was a fait accompli, and besides, what was there that said we had to stop at three when nobody knew how many there were? What was to keep people from accepting five, or eight, or ten, if it was organized right? Because there was room in it for Cage, plenty of room. Because his deal with Helen Raven and Rillington was fifty percent of the proceeds but he’d cut them to a third, that was no problem, didn’t a third of something beat a half of nothing?

  It was my fourth offer. The first two had fallen by the wayside. The last two were a hell of a recommendation for holy matrimony.

  The storm died down inside. Down, say, to a whisper, soft and warm and licking at my ear. Kiss me, the whisper said. Kiss me again.

  I was sweating all over. He was staring at me. I saw the knuckles of his gun hand stiffen and whiten.

  “Geezus, Cagey,” he said in a strained voice, “you never forget, do you.”

  In hindsight, I realize that he was talking about something else, something that went back in time almost as far as Denise. Call it the real bone of contention between us. But on the spot, all I said was:

  “What’s the other deal, Al?”

  He’d been watching me, ramrod stiff. Then all of a sudden, and all together, the muscles of his head and body seemed to let go. His face, his neck, his shoulders. It was like he’d put the last of his chips on the come line and let fly, and thrown a pair of eyes again just like he’d known he would secretly. All at once he gave up, and the air went out of the pumpkin.

  “All right,” he said tonelessly. “I’m tap city, Cagey. It’s yours. All I want is a fair stake, and then I’ll lay it in your lap,
the whole package: the portrait, Helen Raven, Rillington. Then you can play it like you want to. You’ll have to do your own negotiating with them, but it shouldn’t be hard. All Helen really wants is revenge on Cookie Lascault, and Rillington’ll do whatever she tells him to.”

  Another train rolled into the station, the last one as it turned out. But no one got on and no one got off, and if there was anyone else on the platform besides us, I didn’t notice.

  “How much is a fair stake, Al?” I said.

  “I figure ten percent of the original deal I had worked out. That’s two hundred thousand francs, and if you play it right, two hundred thou could be a lot less than ten percent. If I have to, I’ll take half in cash and half in a note. The only thing is: I want it fast. I’ll give you till tomorrow night. No more. Otherwise …”

  He paused.

  “Otherwise what?” I said.

  But all I got for an answer was a staccato laugh and: “Hell, baby, some day you ought to try living on the run with a bitch like that.”

  He glanced at his watch. Tomorrow—or today—was Sunday, but he figured Lascault still ought to be able to come up with that kind of cash. He’d meet me at the same place, at ten o’clock that night. I was to bring the money, alone. Then he’d tell me where to go.

  He glanced at his watch again. Something seemed to revive him momentarily, the idea maybe that, because he’d said it, that was how it was going to happen. Then with a brief grin he placed the gun on the little desk between us.

  It lay there.

  “Your move, baby. Only remember: I know where they are and you don’t.”

  Maybe so, but he’d given me a pretty good idea. And in hindsight, I’d have to say he meant to.

  I was looking at him and the empty tracks behind him. Someone moved into the gap between. For a split second it might have been my move at that, but the split second came and went and then Helen Raven was standing in the doorway behind him, a gun in her hand. It was pointed at the back of Al Dove’s head.

  How much she’d heard I didn’t know. Enough in any case.