by Peter Israel
This time the Alligator only laughed at me from his chair. But Binty and Bernard Lascault didn’t so much as crack a smile, and as for Cookie, I realized that I’d misread her pretty badly. Whatever she knew, it was pretty clear she didn’t give a damn.
As long as she got hers.
It was very quiet in the room. I felt like I’d been throwing punches in a plastic bag. A regular old windmill. I had one left, call it the Yakima Haymaker, and though I didn’t suppose it would bring the fans cheering to their feet, I threw it anyway, just for the hell of it.
“One other thing, Mrs. Lascault,” I said. “There’s the question of the portrait. The so-called fake Blumenstock, which turns out to be the only genuine one. It’s only a Blumenstock though, and from what you’ve just said about posterity, I take it you’re no longer interested?”
“On the contrary,” she replied, drooping again and fixing me with that cool aristocratic stare. “It’s a lovely painting in my opinion. I’m still very much interested.”
“And your offer still holds?”
“My offer?”
“The last time we met, you mentioned a certain figure.”
I detected a flicker of interest on Bernard Lascault’s part.
“Yes, I did,” she replied. “But circumstances have changed. In addition, that offer was for three paintings. Now there is only one.”
“That doesn’t sound very fair to William Rillington.”
“Fair?” She snorted, tossing her head. “But artists have never had decent compensation for their work! Although, under different circumstances, I would be happy to talk to Mr. Rillington about his future.”
What is it about the rich? I began in my mind. But she broke in on the refrain, saying:
“As far as the portrait is concerned, I would consider twelve thousand dollars more than adequate now.”
Twelve thousand dollars. A little more than fifty thousand francs, but not much more. It was the old auction price. Al Dove had huffed and puffed, but now the air was coming out of the balloon and Cookie Lascault was exacting her last revenge.
“I know where it is, Mrs. Lascault,” I said. “I can get it for you.”
I made a mistake before. I said I never saw her smile again. But there it came, right then, folding her skin into hard and gleaming creases.
Bernard Lascault started to answer for her, but she waved him off.
“That won’t be necessary,” she answered. “In fact I’m afraid I’ve no longer any need of your services, Mr. Cage. You see, the … the present owner has been in touch with me herself. We are already in the process of negotiating the sale.”
The Yakima Haymaker had missed. I was flat on my ass, and the referee was counting. I had no particular wish to get up either, and the spectators were already heading for the exits. Binty Dove, the love of my life, had her eyes averted, maybe she couldn’t stand the sight of blood, and Johnny Vee, the fight promoter, was motioning to some of his muscle to come scrape the loser off the canvas.
They broke out of the landscape and came for me. One was black and the other white, which only goes to show how public-spirited the mob’s gotten, but otherwise there wasn’t much to choose between them. They were big and dumb-looking, and even in my better days I wouldn’t have wanted to take either of them on without an elephant gun.
They led me back across the lawn to one of the outbuildings and stuck me inside with the dead wood. There weren’t any windows in this one and little furniture, only a miscellany of gardening equipment and enough cut timber to keep the Lascaults warm for the next decade or so, if ever the Allah-worshippers started tinkering with the oil spigots again. The rich, I guess, think of everything.
I pulled up a log and sat down, and it was there that I had the first of several distinctly unmemorable conversations with the Alligator.
SIXTEEN
Chances are he has his qualities, and I’m sure he loves his mother. But he was a lousy judge of human psychology—mine to begin with—and he couldn’t resist shooting his mouth off.
He started in on Al Dove. Dove, he called him. Dove had him choked up to the windpipe, he wanted Dove in the worst way. Dove, he said, had crossed the Organization for the last time. The Organization had decided to write him off.
“Where is he, Cage?” said Johnny Vee.
“I don’t know.”
He chuckled, a hard rattlely sound.
“At least that’s an improvement on your subway story,” he said.
“What subway story?”
“The one you told the French Law. That he was locked in the Paris subway. Maybe you can get away with that cockamamie bullshit on the French Law. I want the truth.”
There, if you see what I mean. A small disclosure maybe, but the only people I’d told about the métro were Police Judiciaire. The Police Judiciaire at least knew that it wasn’t cockamamie bullshit. But maybe what the Police Judiciaire knew and what they were letting on these days to their brothers in the other branches were two different things.
“What are you going to do to get it, Johnny boy?” I said. “Rearrange my knuckles for me?”
He looked at me a minute. Then the look turned into a sneer.
“What is it that makes punks like you stick together?” he asked.
He turned to the muscle.
“D’you know what Dove did to this punk?” he asked them.
The muscle shook their heads from side to side, and back.
“This punk used all his suck with the Law to help Dove beat a rap. Dove was peddling dope in Westwood—can you imagine that?—and the Law nailed him. And this punk stepped in and made a deal for him, even though it meant embarrassing some people who didn’t want to be embarrassed. And d’you know how Dove paid him back?”
He waited for the muscle to shake their heads again.
They did.
“Dove stole his snatch!”
Johnny Vee thought this punchline very funny. He gave it the big alligator laugh. So did the muscle. Then Johnny Vee stopped laughing, and so did the muscle.
“So how come, Cage? How come punks like you always stick together?”
“It seems to me you ought to know better than me,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, maybe he took me once, if you want to look at it like that, but how many times has the mob … excuse me, the Organization … gone to the wall with him? Let me see, there was dope all right, and then the Rancho del Cielo deal—that was a beaut, wasn’t it?—and now there’s Art. Either somebody upstairs must be pretty dumb, else the … Organization is having a hell of a time recruiting competent personnel. Present company excepted, of course.”
He started to answer back, something about how he was changing that, but then he stopped in midstream.
“Let’s cut the bullshit, Cage,” he said. “Where is he?”
“Like I told you, Johnny boy,” I answered, “I don’t have the foggiest.”
I thought he was going to slug me. He didn’t though. He turned on his heels and went out, and one of the muscle took up guard duty outside the door and the other inside, facing me, though after a while they changed places, to make it more interesting.
All in all, it wasn’t much of a performance. I mean, if you’re going to try to scare information out of some one, you’ve got to follow through. Instead Johnny Vee left me to my thoughts, and the more I thought, the more it occurred to me that something must have gone wrong, that they had some other use for me—a notion that got all the stronger the longer I waited. So that when they finally got around to the rough stuff, I was pretty sure they were only funning.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, I had help too … from the least likely source.
Because all that morning the phone kept ringing in the main house. Each time it rang, the technicians went to work, trying to trace it. And they did too, apparently. Only once she was calling from the Champs Élysées, another time from a café over by the Odéon, another time from the Gare
du Nord. The Professor was really jumping around town that morning, without rhyme or reason, and every time she dialed Chantilly, she changed the rules of the game. Maybe somewhere buried in the archives of the Service de la Répression des Fraudes Artistiques you could still find the tapes of those conversations, though I’d be inclined to doubt it, but they must have been something to hear. Because if Cookie Lascault thought at one point that she was going to be able to have her cake for twelve thousand bucks, she was dead wrong. The certainty must have changed into hope, and then the hope too went up in an explosion of vengeance and vilification. Along the way the price kept shifting too, and so did the method of payment. At the next-to-the-last call, Cookie was to come herself, alone, with cash in a suitcase. Apparently she agreed to that too, at least over the phone. But Helen Raven had the last word, and if I wasn’t there to listen in, I can still imagine the gist of it: Suppose I decide not to sell it at any price! Suppose that’s my price: no price!
I learned some of this from Johnny Vee. I couldn’t say exactly at what stage in the negotiations he came back into the woodshed, only that they must have taken a sour turn by then. If Cookie Lascault hadn’t panicked yet, she was at least willing to let him try it his way. Not that he sullied his own hands. We had a brief question-and-answer period, not a very satisfactory one from his point of view, and then he simply loosed the muscle on me. There wasn’t much I could do about it. I covered up while I could, and took it, the kind of classic impersonal battering the mob teaches its boys in kindergarten.
They propped me up on a stool when they were done and held me there. I was swallowing a mixture of blood and saliva, but when my tongue worked its way around my teeth, they were all present and accounted for. Funning, like I said. Johnny Vee leaned over me and asked me again where the picture was. I looked up at him, grinning through the tears, and told him to go fuck himself. He gave me a shot himself then, for the folks back home, but I hardly felt a thing, and when he turned and went out again, I knew in some weird way that things were looking up.
The second wait was shorter than the first. Through the open door I saw him standing in the sunlight, some halfway across the lawn. He shouted something to the muscle outside the door and motioned with his arm. They delivered me to him.
The sun felt good. A light breeze dried my sweat, and walking took some of the wobble out of my legs. Johnny Vee led me inside, into a deep-pile bathroom with scented soap, gold-leafed spigots and towels as soft as cashmere. I looked at my face in the mirror. One of the eyes was almost closed. I did what I could about the rest of it, even making a few passes with an electric razor provided for guests, and though the result mightn’t have won any beauty contests, well, I’d seen worse.
“Let’s go, Cage,” said Johnny Vee.
He was standing near the door, his arms folded across his chest. I went up to him. Under the circumstances it couldn’t have been much more than a love tap, but I let him have it anyway, high on his alligator snout. Just for fun.
He took it like a man.
Breakfast was long since over. The company had moved into the drawing room, the one with all the paintings I’d seen on my first visit, and Cookie Lascault was slumped in that same high-backed white chair that molded around her body.
Things may have been looking up, but you’d never have known it from her. Well, you could say, a dame her age isn’t likely to get any better as the day goes on, but to look at her then you’d have to wonder if she was going to make it till tea-time. Her hair had gone scraggly, her eyes dull, and her skin had that shiny pallor to it that made you think inevitably of Hammond organs and Forest Lawn. Maybe Johnny Vee’s boys had worked me over pretty good, but they had nothing on whoever’d done it to her—a realization, I confess, that perked me up considerably.
“I want to talk to Mr. Cage,” she said when I came in. “Alone.”
There was some objection to this.
“Out,” she ordered. “All of you. I want to talk to him alone.”
She waved in the direction of the doors. They started to file out. Then she changed her mind.
“You stay,” she said, pointing at her husband. “I may need you.”
Bernard Lascault stayed. When the others had left he sat down. So did I.
“I’ve had a harrowing morning, Mr. Cage,” said Cookie Lascault. “There’s been enough shilly-shally. I want that painting. I want it now.”
It hurt too much to raise an eyebrow, but I couldn’t resist a few choice remarks. About the sale she’d been supposed to be negotiating, for one thing, and the Alligator for another.
She dismissed them with a deprecating gesture.
“You already know what I think of … of Helen Raven,” she said. “The events of this morning have only confirmed my opinion. I needn’t go into it further. As for what they’ve done to you, I’m not sorry. You probably had it coming to you. You’ll live. But I want that painting. Now. You said you know where it is. I assume you can go get it.”
Just like that, with one snap of the fingers
I thought about it briefly.
“Yes, I might be able to,” I answered.
“Then do it,” she said. “I have no conditions.”
I grinned at her, feeling my skin crack, but she hadn’t meant it as a joke.
“Well I might have a few,” I said.
“Name them. Be quick about it.”
“Money, first of all.”
“How much?”
“Well, the last time we met, you were talking about half a million francs.”
“That was for three paintings.”
“I know. And circumstances keep changing, don’t they? I’d say half would be fair. Say, two hundred and fifty thou …”
“Go get my checkbook,” she interrupted. Even though she didn’t call him by name, he knew who she was talking to.
But I shook my head.
“Cash,” I said. “No offense intended, but I’ll take it in cash.”
For the first time that day, I saw some expression in Bernard Lascault’s face. Call it consternation.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand francs!” he objected. “We don’t have that much in the …”
“Go get it,” she interrupted imperiously. “As much as we have. Bring it to me.”
He was gone quite a while. I like to think he had to slit open their conjugal mattress. But when he came back, it was with one of those old-fashioned brown leather briefcases, and the briefcase was stuffed to the gunwales with printed legal tender, courtesy of the Banque de France.
He put it on the coffee table between us.
“How much is in there?” she asked him.
“A little over 160,000,” he said.
“Is that all we have?”
“That’s all, at least until …”
“We’ll call it 160,000. You’ll have to take the rest in a check, Mr. Cage. Ninety thousand francs. Once you’ve delivered the painting.”
Haggling to the end. I would have grinned at her in appreciation, but it hurt me to grin. Besides, I had other conditions to fulfill.
The first was purely technical. I had no intention of coming back to Chantilly if I could help it, and I wanted the Giulia delivered to my hotel. I tossed Bernard Lascault the keys. To my surprise, he caught them.
Then there was the little matter of my letter from the Prefecture of Police.
“You may not know anything about this either, Mrs. Lascault, but I’m walking around with a twenty-four-hour expulsion notice in my pocket. It runs out at midnight tonight. I want that lifted.”
“It will be,” she said.
“Who’ll take care of that? You or Bernard?”
“I will,” her husband put in.
“Once the painting’s been delivered, of course,” she said. “Is that all?”
“Not quite. I don’t want any of Johnny Vee’s boys coming along for the ride. Or your friends from the police either. When I get the painting I’ll let you know where to pick it up, but in
between I want a free hand. Is that clear?”
They both nodded.
“Then there’s just one other thing,” I said. “I want one of you to go along with me. To protect your interests, if you want to look at it that way.”
Bernard Lascault started to protest. I guess he thought I meant him.
“Who?” said Cookie Lascault, cutting him off.
“Mrs. Dove,” I answered.
SEVENTEEN
At that you have to give them credit. I’m talking about the so-called oppressed sex. The next time one of them starts laying the sob story on you, complete with equal job opportunities, you tell her about Cookie Lascault.
And Binty Dove.
Once we’d left the village, I stopped the van. Then she pushed her shades up onto her head and threw her arms around me. I winced, and she drew back, and tears welled in her eyes, big real ones, and the tips of her fingers grazed my wounds.
“My God,” she said. “What did they do to you, you poor baby?”
“Oh, they were only fooling around,” I said. “They just got a little carried away.”
“I couldn’t stand it,” she said. “When they took you away, I couldn’t stand it. But what was I to do?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was like that this morning too. At Bernard’s apartment.”
“You mean you were there?”
“That’s right. I was out in the street. I guess it was a lucky thing I showed up early, honh?”