The French Kiss

by Peter Israel

  “You’re selling cheap, aren’t you, Al,” she said. It came out a statement, not a question. He started, but she jammed the barrel end hard into his neck. “If you turn around, you bastard, I’ll blow your head off. You!” she snapped at me. “Very carefully now. I want you to brush that gun off the desk and onto the floor. Don’t try to pick it up.”

  “Wait a minute, Professor,” I said. “Guns that are brushed onto the floor have a way of going off. I …”

  “You shut up!” she shrilled at me. You could feel the suppressed hysteria oozing out of her pores and Al Dove’s pupils went large in their sockets. “You do what I tell you to do! NOW!”

  I did, very carefully. The artillery clattered at my feet. Then it lay still.

  She told Al Dove to push forward in his chair. He did, until we were sitting knee to knee, at which she moved inside the booth and covered us both.

  “Two hundred thousand francs,” she said, the words bursting scornfully out of her. “That’s cheap, Al. Isn’t that cheap? What wouldn’t you sell for two hundred thousand francs? And only half of it in cash. After all I’ve been through, that’s what it comes down to. To be sold out for two hundred thousand francs by a cheap gangster.”

  “Wait a minute, Helen, you’ve …”

  “Shut up!” The command shrilled again in the small booth. “Stand up, Al!”

  He stood up. His face, pale and tense, loomed over me. I could see the sweat bubbling on his forehead. He looked like he thought he was going to check out any second.

  “I’ve had enough of your schemes, your sweet talk, your reassurances! If you’re so damn clever, how come you let me follow you here? You said the portrait alone would be worth half a million, didn’t you? Half a million minimum, isn’t that what you said? Well suppose I decide I won’t sell it at any price? Suppose that’s my price: no price! Then what the hell do I need you for?”

  “You’re crazy!” he shouted, half-turning his head. “They’ll chew you up and spit you out! Don’t be a damn fool, Helen, you’ll get nothing! You’ll …”

  “SHUT UP, GOD DAMN YOU!”

  It was alarm time in the cockpits of hell. The boiler was about to blow. The gongs were going off and the red lights flashing, the dials spinning and the voices of panic bleeping out of control. It was time to bail out … for Alan Dove, ex-courtier, and for B. F. Cage as well.

  But just then, without warning, the lights went out. It happened first on the far platform, then on ours. Click followed by click, and the station plunged into darkness.

  It threw her, just for a second. I’d already dug my chair into the wall. Now I thrust off, driving for the doorway. Only Al Dove had the opposite reflex. He stooped, ducking either from her or for the gun. My head, then my shoulder, slammed into him, flinging him back, and the cannon went off between us even as we catapulted into her. I took the blast of it right in the eyes and somewhere behind me a thousand sheets of glass shattered into a million or more small pieces. Then the three of us exploded out of the booth in a burst of pinwheeling bodies, like somebody had flung a grenade among us, and something carved my legs out from under me neatly and plunged me forward, smashing my face into the stone of the platform. I scraped and slid painfully toward the edge, and I saw the stars you’re supposed to see all right, only they had jagged edges and they pulsed and tore in time to my blood beat, and a herd of heavenly horses went charging across my skull and down the platform, racing for the last train.

  Only the last train had gone. And there weren’t any horses, only two ghostly shapes swaying and staggering to their feet on a cosmic platform a couple of light-years off. Something had gone screwy with my vision. It was like the whole dark station was flashing in light but the two of them were ghosts, like after-images or white blurs on a negative. I saw Al Dove wobbling near the booth. His hands seemed to be raised above his head. A long way away I heard his voice telling her not to be crazy, telling her she’d never get away with it alone, telling her the station was already locked, that even if she killed us both she’d never get out of the fucking station. Even then, half-stunned and with the panic squeezing his larynx, he was trying to make a deal. But the Professor was beyond listening. I’d seen her scabbling on the platform, I’d seen her come up with the gun. She held it out in front of her, in both hands, and if the rest of her was teetering like a drunken tightrope walker, the gun was clenched stiff. She backed off a couple of steps. Then she fired: once, twice, three times, her body jumping each time, and turned, and ran down the platform in the direction of the darkened exit, and the echoes of the blasts were drowned out by Al Dove’s screaming.

  TWELVE

  I tasted blood. It was trickling down from my nose. I got to my feet. From somewhere came a dim light, but I didn’t have to wait for my eyes to adjust to it to find Al Dove.

  He was shaking with shock and screaming his bloody head off. He was convinced he was going to croak any second, and even if he didn’t Helen Raven would be back to finish us off. The only recourse was the tunnel. We had to get into the tunnel before she came back. He tried to stand up, but cried out instead and sank backwards onto a bench and started begging me to finish him off, please Jesus God Cagey to get the gun and put him out of his misery. Whereupon it took all my strength to hold him to the bench, because Helen was going to be back any second, the entrance would be locked, there was no other way out, she’d shoot us down like rats in a trap if we didn’t get into the fucking tunnel.

  As it happened, he was wrong on both counts: Helen Raven wasn’t coming back, and he wasn’t about to croak. As near as I could tell, two of her bullets had missed altogether. The third had pierced his left breast but high, almost at the armpit, and it had come out under his shoulder blade. Or most of it. There wasn’t much blood. It could have nicked bone on the way through and he’d need to see a doctor, but I was pretty sure he’d live all right.

  If, that is, he didn’t die of fright first.

  Because the fear was in him, along with that end-of-the-road sobbing and blubbering and remorse which is one of the sorrier spectacles, even in a world short on heroics. To understand it, you’d probably have to go back before the cocky young guinea I’d first known, back to the altar boy lighting candles in St. Geronimo’s in downtown San Berdoo.

  But like I say, I can’t take you that far, and come to think of it, he himself stopped short of calling for a priest, that night there in the métro.

  Though maybe that was because he got his ole buddy Cage to hear his last confession.

  Roll it back then, a couple of decades and then some, to where I came in. I’ve called it the last of the funky summers, and it was a pretty weird time. Another war was starting up, people said it was the beginning of Big Three, but to those of us who were eligible to fight it or almost, it was bugoutsville, fuck it, every man for himself. As far as Mrs. Cage’s boy was concerned, I took off the day after my junior year in high school, leaving a good-by note pinned to the Post Toasties. I worked my way south, the length of the great and sovereign state of California. I got laid in Pershing Square, got the crap pounded out of me in Echo Park, and thumbed my way east across the desert with nothing in my wallet but a pack of safes and two draft cards, one of which said eighteen, the other twenty-one, and both of them fake. In Kingman, Arizona, I signed on with a pipeline crew. I worked, ate, slept, and gambled with a bunch of oversized aztecs and apaches until I had two hundred and fifty bucks clear. Then I headed some ninety miles up the road, to Paradise.

  Paradise? Well, they called it Vegas, too. Maybe the Flamingo had only just gone up, and surely nobody in town had even heard of Howard Hughes, but to a red-blooded youth with cash money in his jeans, it was Baghdad, Gomorrah, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa all rolled into one. The neon popped your eyeballs. You could eat your fill of steak for a couple of bucks and see a show at the same time. They had these cute little dealers with lacquered fingernails sharp enough to cut the Ace of Spades in two, and those who weren’t dealing came around every half
hour or so with drinks on the house. Plus slot machines in every head, metal dollars instead of paper, and everybody talking about some old stiff too drunk to walk who’d run $50 into $13,000 at the Golden Nugget the night before.

  I took the Governor’s Suite in the biggest hotel on Fremont, cash on the barrelhead. Then I decked myself out like Napoleon on the eve of Austerlitz and set out to parlay Cage’s Sure-Thing Blackjack System into a trip to Mexico or Rio or pretty much anywhere south of Yakima, Washington, where they had hot and cold running maids and champagne in the spigots.

  About eighteen hours and maybe thirty-six white lightnings later, I remember the cute little dealer tapping her fingernail on the felt to see if I was up. I remember fumbling through my pockets and coming up with what was left of a one-way bus ticket to nowhere. I remember that the cute little dealer’s lips were as red as her fingernails and that she had black eyes and black shiny hair. And that’s the last thing I remember until I woke up the next morning, if it was morning, dry-mouthed and sick-bellied, on the deep pile rug of the Governor’s Suite, with this dude who’d been playing next to me konked out on His Excellency’s bed.

  We introduced ourselves. Al, meet B. F. Cage. Cagey, meet Al Dovici, in cowboy boots and chinos.

  We inventoried our remaining assets. These consisted of our clothes and my bus ticket. We went down to the depot and traded in what was left of the bus ticket for a couple of platters of scrambled eggs and hashed browns. But then we were tapped out and walking the streets, touchy as a pair of ovulating broads and itching all over from that big gnawing get-even gambler’s feeling. The sickness is short, and no junkie ever had it worse.

  Until we ran into Denise.

  Actually she was a schoolteacher on vacation, and she wasn’t half bad. She came from somewhere in Wisconsin. She drove one of those coffee-grinder ’47 Fords. She fed us and shared her motel room with us and just about everything else except her hoard. She gave us a couple of bucks a day for walking-around money. It would last us maybe fifteen minutes and then we’d come begging, but she said she wasn’t about to let a couple of underage losers blow her year’s savings. So mostly we watched her, at roulette, and in between spins of the wheel we took turns balling her. But after a few days of balling and watching, the itch was driving us clean out of our sockets.

  Then she decided to take a day off, if it was okay with us. It was okay with us. We loaded the back of the Ford with as much beer as it could hold and drove down to Lake Mead. It’s a beautiful spot, Lake Mead, even if it is man-made, and Boulder Dam holds it all together. We swam, and baked in the sun, and played grabass in the shallow water, and drank beer, swam some more, drank some more, and when we ran out of beer all three of us fell asleep.

  Except for Al and me.

  He looked at me, and I looked at him.

  “C’mon Cagey,” he said. “It’s bug-out time.’

  We sold the Ford to a moon-faced aztec in Vegas who would have paid you 25 percent of value for your town fire engine. Then we got on a bus for Reno, where Al said the real action was, and where the first and last of the funky summers came to an abrupt halt, about six A.M. one late August morning.

  I remember it well. We’d had our run. We’d doubled our stake, then doubled the doubled, but before you could say eighter from Decatur, the dice went stone-age cold in our hands. I remember him turning away from the table, red-eyed, and feeling not the sickness any more, just done in, wasted, and him laying it on me:

  “Fuck it, Cagey. Let’s join the fucking army and get it over with.”

  We had to lie about our age, but all the recruiters did in those cannon-fodder days was count your eyes. We went through basic training together and a couple of months later the two of us and a few thousand other young braves were paddling west across the dark and deep Pacific to save the free world.

  Only Al Dovici managed to get off in Japan. How I never quite knew at the time, only that it was one of those now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t deals, because one morning he was present and accounted for in the replacement company and the next, another sorry stiff was standing in his place. In between there’d been an all-night poker game. Oh yes, and the other sorry stiff was me. I had a one-way ticket to a place called Kunuri, Korea, and when I got there a padded Chinaman on horseback punched me the rest of the way through to Prison Camp Number Five up at Pyoktong, and if it was too long a walk to get there for Christmas, I had the next one and the one after to make up for it.

  I used to think about him in the bad times. I could see the pair of dice in his palm, hear him sweet-talking them. I used to wonder what would have happened if one of those snake eyes had rolled over on its back and come up a six. Or if the dealer with the red fingernails had slipped me an ace to go with my king instead of a trey. Or if I’d read William Shakespeare in high school instead of Captain Marvel. Then Al would butt in in my mind, in the middle of one of those bullshit conversations we’d had about what we were going to do after the war, saying: A private eye? Geezus, Cagey, you must be out of your mind! Because he’d had us opening up the biggest chain of cathouses the West Coast had ever seen, all the way from Puget Sound to Chula Vista. And I’d wonder if he’d organized Yokohama for starters. But then the day came when his hitch would have been up, mine too, and after that I stopped thinking about him as much as I could, and about mostly everything.

  I ran into him again in San Francisco, late in 1953. I’d been all over the country, courtesy of the U.S. Army, telling my ugly story about the Communist statements I’d signed as far east as Washington, D.C., and to no one under the rank of major. It was still up for grabs whether they were going to let me go or put me to making little rocks out of big for the next ten years or so. In the end they chose the first solution, but under conditions “other than honorable,” which meant among other things that I never could get that investigator’s license I hankered after. Or so I thought then, and by the time I found out who to pay off, I no longer gave a damn.

  In any case, by 1953 Al Dove was already running a string of hookers in and out of the Broadway saloons. Later on he traded the girls in for cars, then the cars for dope, the dope for real estate, the real estate finally for art, but the scenario was always the same: the action was always terrific, the mob was involved somewhere, and there was always plenty of room in it for his ole buddy Cage.

  Only his ole buddy Cage never forgot, did he?

  No, probably he didn’t. Not even when he finally got his own thing together. Not certainly after that boozy reunion on Broadway in San Francisco, 1953, when Al Dove told him his version of what had happened in Japan.

  There’d been a poker game all right in the replacement company, an all-nighter, and for the first and maybe only time in his life Al Dove had gotten out at the right time. He’d taken them all, but none more than a certain sergeant whom he’d cleaned right down to his socks, and then some. When the time came to settle up, he was holding a fistful of the sergeant’s markers. This had created quite a ticklish problem. To which, however, there was one simple solution. The sergeant had finally agreed. In exchange for the markers, he simply struck the name of Dovici from a certain roster. What Al hadn’t realized, he said, was that somebody else was going to have to go in his place, and by the time he found out that the somebody was his ole buddy Cage, they’d already pulled up the anchor and thrown away the gangplank.

  No, I guess I never forgot. Not even a couple of decades later in the Paris métro, when the real story came pouring out.

  Actually, his setup for that night had been just as simple. The métro shuts down a little after one A.M. Shortly after the passage of the last train, the station attendant makes his final rounds, wakes up the bums, turns off the lights, then closes and chains the metal grilles across the entrance and snaps shut the padlocks and abandons the joint to the rats. Al Dove had paid the attendant to keep the grilles open till he came out. The way he’d had it figured, his parley with his ole buddy Cage could have taken one of several turns, but no matt
er what happened he’d have his escape route, and by the time I found mine he’d have been long gone.

  What is it they say about history repeating itself?

  Only this time it had blown. This time Helen Raven held the markers, and he hadn’t planned on her showing up to collect, much less leaving him with a hole in his shoulder. Maybe you could say he’d been there before, in spots as tight and tighter, and had managed to wriggle through. But this time he had no wriggle left, only a lot of whimper and cower, plus a confession the size of the Matterhorn weighing on his brain.

  First though, armed with his cannon and my matches, I left him and went up the exit stairs. If the Professor was hiding in a broom closet, she didn’t come out. The ticket booth was empty, the door to it locked, and so was every other door I found. I vaulted over the turnstiles and came up against the first of two grilles, one at the bottom of the steps up to the street, the other at the top. Both were padlocked. It wasn’t hard to imagine the attendant’s reaction when the Professor changed his instructions. I saw the gray glow of the upstairs world through the grilles, heard the sporadic sounds of traffic. Maybe I could have shot our way out, but that’s a trickier business than they make it out in the movies, and the last thing I wanted right then was company, particularly in uniform.

  Finally I made my way back down to the platform. The light was better there. I realized that it came from the single bulbs strung at intervals through the tunnels. Al Dove was slumped forward on the bench. His shirt was damp but more from sweat, I judged, than blood. I tore the sleeve of it off his good side and made a makeshift bandage with it, lit one of his cigarettes for him, then went to the booth. It wasn’t my day for telephones though. I didn’t get so much as a bleep out of the receiver, and no combination of numbers I tried produced a dial tone. The line was dead. The choice, as far as I could see, came down then to trying to shoot off the padlocks or waiting till the system opened up again in the early morning.