The French Kiss (17 page)

But I couldn't budge him.

“Get going, Cagey,” he said finally. “Stick one in her for me.” Then, in a hoarse whisper: “Just leave me the fucking gun.”

I thought about that a moment. I assumed his her and the one I was going after were different, but in hindsight I was wrong about that. But right about the gun. I figured he wouldn't shoot me if I gave it to him. He didn't. I was pretty sure he wouldn't shoot himself either.

I went into the tunnel. The last thing I heard from him was a panicky shout:

“Come back, Cagey! Geezus Christ, you can't leave me here to die!”

I suppose, though, that it's a testament to something or other about the Al Doves of this world that when the police finally showed up, all they found were the padlocks blasted off the grilles up near the street and the two gates ajar.

THIRTEEN

A few stations down the line, the métro came out of the ground and crossed the Seine on a bridge. It was no big deal to walk it, and I wouldn't even mention it if it weren't for my furry little enemies. The tunnel was full of them, and those I didn't see I invented. I went from tie to tie, plagued by the idea of stepping on one. The further I went the more it worked me over, and I fought it off like a kid in the dark telling himself there are no rats, there are no rats, while my body overheated like an engine racing in first gear and the smell of me brought them squeezing through the chinks and cracks.

I guess it's a dumb enough phobia for a grown man. I mean, you know they're there. Some say the underground population of Paris, France, is several times larger than the human Besides, hadn't there been that time in my life, on the far side of the globe, when we'd hunted and roasted them, a gaunt band of scarecrows armed with sticks and bare hands?

Sure, there'd been that time.

Still, when the tracks finally started climbing in a big slow leftward curve, I broke into a run. And when I smelled the cool night air, saw the gray glow of the Paris sky, I felt like I was coming out of the bowels of hell all right, but a hell made up of leaping scurrying creatures no bigger than your foot, with eyes of solid pupil and bodies cringing with fear and appetite.

I climbed onto a narrow ledge. It led in turn to a platform. Just after the tracks came out aboveground was another station, the last one before the river. Down below was the Right-Bank expressway, beyond it the Seine.

I found myself gulping air. I let it wash over me. My legs were trembling—those quirky little uncontrollable jumps just under the skin, and I held onto the balustrade, watching the Seine and the sparse lights of the cars, until they went away.

The moon had long since set. I was well up the river from the center of town, and any minute, it seemed to me, the sky would start to brighten. But my watch said only 2:45
A.M.

I had some phone calls to make.

I went over the parapet and edged along the outside ledge until I reached the exit staircase, a spidery column that descended out of the station and doubled back on itself to the quays below. Then I worked my way down the outside of it, hand under hand and foot under foot, until I could jump back down among the living.

The living, though, were largely asleep. I finally found a pay phone on the quays, but when I reached into my pockets for change, I came up empty-handed. Helped out by a red light, I stopped an empty cab. He was going home, emergency or not, and it wasn't till I stuffed a hundred-franc bill into his meter that I got him to dig into his change purse and come up with half a dozen twenty-centime pieces. At that the exchange rate must have impressed him, because he hung around while I called and later, after a detour to a café near the Gare de Lyon, he dropped me off at the Hôtel de Ville underground garage where I changed into the Giulia.

I tried twice to get the message through to Dedini. But the commissaire, it turned out, didn't work all the time after all. In fact it being Sunday, there was every chance he couldn't be reached till Monday. I started to tell my story to the duty officer at Police Secours, but he broke in on me, telling me he was transferring me to the Police Judiciaire, and then somewhere between Police Secours and the Police Judiciaire the damn line went dead in my ear. The second time around I started shouting into the mouthpiece even as the same clown answered. Strangely enough, it worked. I told him they'd better get hold of the commissaire in a hurry, that half the package was ready for delivery, that Alan Dove was currently locked in a métro station with a hole in his shoulder and that if they didn't get moving he could bleed to death. I gave him the location, and then he came back on calmly, asking me what the name was please?

“DOVE!” I exploded into the phone. “D-O-V-E. He's the man you're supposed to be looking for!”

No, but he had that much. It was my name he wanted.

“CAGE!” I shouted. “C-A-G-E.”

“Would you mind spelling that please?”

I laughed, more in sorrow than in anger. I spelled it for him again, slowly, in French. But when he started getting personal, like asking where I was calling from, I broke the connection. The last thing I wanted, on my last day in Paris, was the company of the Law.

With the cabbie's remaining two coins I reached … Bernard Lascault's taped voice. I hung up and banged the metal box with my fist, which brought a small cascade of change into the return slot. Not that it did me any good. There was no way you could call outside Paris on that phone, not with all the twenty-centime pieces in the world.

Or so the cabbie informed me. He was a big-bellied Frenchman, with a red face and a squashed nose. He'd been leaning against his car, cleaning his fingernails with a crimped matchstick, while I tried to dial the third number. He asked me where I was calling. I said L'Isle-Adam. He said I'd never get L'Isle-Adam on a blue phone. I looked at the one I'd been using. It was blue all right. I asked him where I could find a red or a yellow or just a plain old black one.

He thought it over. Then with a belch and a heavy sigh, he told me to get in, and we found the open café near the Gare de Lyon, where another hundred francs set him up behind a flagon of café red and got me the use of the patron's instrument.

The connection went through before the second ring. What's more, there was no trace of sleep in the voice that answered. Nor, for that matter, was it taped.

“This is Bernard Lascault,” said Bernard Lascault, live.

“Welcome back, Mr. Lascault,” I said. “And this is Cage, remember me? Your friendly neighborhood investigator? I'm sorry to bother you in the middle of the night, but I'm trying to reach Mrs. Dove.”

“Where did you get this number?” he asked suspiciously.

“Oh, my fairy godmother gave it to me.” Which was true, in a way. It was the first of the numbers La Ducrot had punched out that day in her office. “But about Mrs. Dove, Mr. Lascault. I'm trying to contact her. It's pretty urgent.”

“I'm afraid I wouldn't know how to help you.”

“You wouldn't?”

“No, I wouldn't. Where are you calling from?”

“Never mind about that. But it's pretty peculiar, isn't it? Mrs. Dove was staying with you, wasn't she? In your apartment in town? I'm not the only one who knows about that, by the way. The police do too. And she told me that's where she'd be. As of this afternoon—yesterday afternoon, that is—that's what she told me Only she's not there.”

“I”

“But you wouldn't know about that either, would you?”

“Let me tell you something. You've been meddling in matters that don't concern you. I don't believe I'm the first to have told you that either, but you seem to forget it as soon as you've heard it. That's a dangerous habit. Even the most patient people lose their patience. If I were you …”

“But you're not me,” I interrupted. “And before you start handing out advice, you should check it first with Mrs. Dove. Anyway, maybe I'd like to stop meddling and maybe I wouldn't, but it's gone beyond that. Beyond patience too. People have started shooting, in case you haven't heard, and somebody I know is walking around with a twenty-four-hour expulsion notice in his pocket. But I suppose you wouldn't know anything about that either, would you?”

“No, I wouldn't,” he said, his voice rising. “In point of fact, I just got back this evening.”

“Yeah, I heard you were out of town.” I glanced at the clock behind the bar. It would have been evening in New York and cocktail hour on the West Coast. “Now don't tell me, let me guess. I bet you've been visiting your farflung enterprises. Like your L.A. branch? Tell me, how are things in sunny California?”

He didn't answer. But suddenly his absence those last few days began to make sense.

“I didn't think you'd stoop so low,” I said. “I mean, in the people you associate with. I thought you preferred to deal through courtiers.”

“That doesn't concern you. Not in the slightest. I've told you before. The affair is closed.”

“All right,” I said. “Then just give Mrs. Dove a message for me. Like the next time you happen to run into her.” My voice slowed down to a walk. “Tell her I've found her property. All of it.”

There was silence at the other end of the line, followed by some kind of commotion, followed by silence again.

I thought he might have hung up on me.

But then, small-voiced:

“Is that you, Cagey?”

“None other,” I answered, going tight inside.

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, not so bad. I got scraped up a little and my face isn't too pretty, but you should've seen the other guy. How about you?”

“I was so scared, Cagey. Where're you calling from?”

“Let me see.” I gazed around the café. “I think it's a place called Paris.”

She didn't laugh. She didn't say anything.

“The other guy was Al, Binty,” I said.

By this time the conversation had gone distinctly one way.

“I found him for you,” I said. “Or—not that it matters—he found me. Isn't that what you wanted me to do?”

“What did you do to him?” she said finally. There was a trace of dread in her voice, more than a trace, but in hindsight that could have been taken in opposite ways.

“Oh, nothing much really,” I answered. “We talked over old times.”

“Is he with you now?”

“No. In fact the last I saw of him, he had a small hole in him. About the size of a dime. But I expect he'll pull through.”

“Where is he?”

“I imagine by now the Law's got him.”

“The police?”

“Don't worry, they'll take good care of him. The only trouble is there's another stiff they can't do anything for, fellow by the name of Pierrot. Worked for a detective agency, wouldn't you know? By a queer coincidence, they found him in the Montmorency forest. That's not far from where you are, is it? Stranger still, it turns out he was one of the tails in that café on the Boulevard St. Germain. Remember?”

“God,” she said. But there wasn't much conviction in it. Then, huskily: “Did you kill him, Cagey?'

“No. Did you?”

It mightn't have done much for her in court, but there was a kind of honesty at that … in her silence.

“I've also located that missing property you wanted,” I went on. “That is, if you and Bernard are still interested in it. You are, aren't you?”

I paused, waiting for a reaction. I mean, it's not the money that counts, but you'd like a little recognition now and then.

“Yes,” she answered finally. “We are. Where is it?”

“I'm afraid that's going to cost you some.”

“How much?”

“Oh, say two hundred thousand francs. Cash And then you'll have to do your own negotiating.”

“Who with?”

“With Helen Raven, I expect. The only trouble with that is … well, Helen's in a sort of nasty mood these days. For one thing, somebody's got some of her property too. Or what she thinks is hers.”

Another pause. Then:

“Cagey, I think we'd better talk.”

“Yeah, good idea. When and where? Do you want me to come out there?”

“Out here? No, not out here. What about your hotel?”

It was a hell of a thing. Just the day before we'd been death-do-us-part lovers and now we were arguing about where to meet. But I didn't like the idea of the hotel any better than she liked L'Isle-Adam.

I suggested Lascault's apartment over in the 15th. I told her I could be there in half an hour.

For some reason, this agitated her no end.

“
Half an hour
? You must be out of your mind, darling! It's the middle of the night!”

“Oh? Well, so it is. I must have forgotten. Funny thing, but I feel fresh as a daisy.”

I hadn't realized that I'd interrupted her beauty sleep. I hadn't realized either—I guess because I didn't want to—that every time she dropped her end of the dialogue, it was to check her lines with her friend Bernard. And anybody else who happened to have dropped by.

“I'll tell you what,” she said, coming back on. “Don't get the wrong idea, my darling, but I think we could both use a few hours' sleep. Me at least. Why don't we meet there in the morning? I'll get there as fast as I can. Is nine o'clock all right? Can you be there at nine?”

“Any time you say.”

“And Cagey … are you still there, Cagey?”

“Sure. I'm right here.”

“Don't misunderstand. I love you, my man. It's just that …”

She let it hang there. I finished it for her.

“I get it, Binty. You mean that the wind's died down.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Okay. I'll explain everything in the morning. I'll be there. Sleep well, my darling.”

She kissed me over the phone. So she said. I hung up, and after checking the timer he'd set when I began the call, the patron started to make me change.