Corsican Death (11 page)

As soon as she asked about it, the fleshy woman wished she hadn’t. She had noticed the scar before, months ago, when her husband had first introduced her to the American narcotics agent, and it had intrigued her. But now, God, why couldn’t she have kept her mouth shut? John Bolt was an agent working in narcotics, and that meant he had gotten the scar when someone had tried to kill him.

She wasn’t sure about that, but she was
pretty sure,
because when you’re a policeman’s wife, you sense things. You know, you just know. And because she was a policeman’s wife, she didn’t want to hear about a policeman—any policeman—getting shot.

It reminded her of what
could
happen to Roger.

The four of them—Bolt, Roger, Edith, and Jean-Paul—sat outside in back of Jean-Paul’s small house, enjoying the cool morning sunshine and blossoming green trees of a Paris April. Dogs were everywhere on the small patio—French poodles, cocker spaniels, a dachshund, a Saint Bernard. And puppies. Small, warm, cute, and friendly. Bolt, eyes picking out the puppies, gave them a half-smile. Enjoy it while you can, fellas. The older you get, the tougher it gets.

He let the subject of his scar drop. His green eyes went to Edith’s face, and he understood why she didn’t ask him more questions. I can dig it, baby, and you’re right. Why be reminded? You’re right about something else, too. I
did
get it trying to stay alive.

Two New York cops on the pad, greedy little hands grabbing every dollar they could get from dope dealers, got tired of hearing me tell them I didn’t want in. And when they heard I was going to drop their names before a federal grand jury investigating police tie-ups with dope dealers, they paid me a visit at my apartment and things got hairy.

Shooting. A gun battle in my living room, and when it was over, they were dead and I was
almost
dead. Two bullets in my gut, one across my forehead. But I lived to tell the tale, and it hurts only when I laugh, which ain’t too often.

Jean-Paul came out of his house, croissants piled on a plate. “
Voilà,
as we French say. They’re hot. Watch your fingers, everybody.”

Setting them down on the small glass table, he stepped back, looking down at the plate. He nodded once, pleased with his own cooking. The big French policeman said nothing else, waiting for the verdict.

John Bolt, mouth full, shook his head from side to side. “Mmmmm.” Fucking incredible. Best croissants he’d ever tasted. Fresh taste, soft, still hot, and just fucking incredible. Jean-Paul was some cook.

“In America when something’s good, we say it’s bad. And Jean-Paul, these are some bad croissants.” Bolt smiled at him.

“Crazy, you Americans are crazy.” Edith was not fond of America or Americans, though she tolerated Bolt because her husband and Jean-Paul did. She was a short woman, somewhere between cute and all right in the face, outspoken, chubby, and she made her own clothes, which tended to make her feel more virtuous than anyone else around her.

Roger Dinard was something of a puritan, too, principled as hell; but in him it was believable, and it didn’t bother Bolt, at least. Maybe it was because Roger—short, fat body, moustache, and all—was putting his life on the line for what he believed. At almost any time, crooked cops, Corsicans, hoods from a dozen countries, could blow Roger away and he’d be lying naked on a marble slab in the morgue, an identification tag around his big toe.

But what the hell, Edith was all right. Why not? She wasn’t married to Bolt, was she?

“Staggers,” said Dinard. “Some of those names he gave you we didn’t have. Maybe it’s good that you came to France, Johnny, even if you stay only a short time.”

“Yeah. I like Paris, but like you say, it’s a short time. Counting today, I got four more days, and that’s it. I come out in the open after that, and France and America remain friends.”

Jean-Paul, who loved his own cooking, stuffed three-fourths of a croissant into his mouth, licked his fingers, chewed, then swallowed. Taking another from the plate, he broke off a small piece and fed it to the collie who had both front paws on Jean-Paul’s huge thighs and an expectant look on his thin tan-and-white face. “You’re going to see Cloris Carroll.”

“Yeah. Staggers says she’s the gal Alain’s been with the most lately. What the hell, he might come back to her, hide out until he can square things with his brother about the killing and the four million.”

“Not just his brother,” said Roger, reaching for another croissant. “Remy’s the one. He’s a bad one, and I don’t mean bad like Jean-Paul’s cooking. I mean bad like sick in his mind. He hasn’t done anything in the past twenty-four hours, at least that we’ve heard of. But you watch. Soon, real soon, he’s going to strike. Claude was his brother, and Remy’s a Corsican. It is a matter of honor to do something about that He has no choice.”

Bolt nodded. Roger was right. Corsica. An island 105 miles off the southern coast of France, and nothing special about it except that Napoleon Bonaparte was born there over two hundred years ago and what was left of the French Foreign Legion was currently stationed there. A tough place, rugged, bare, populated by people who didn’t like outsiders, who were clannish and damn quick to kill in “defense of their honor.”

On Corsica men kill each other in an argument over one sheep. God help your ass if you touch somebody’s virgin daughter; and politics on Corsica, Bolt knew, involved a lot of plastic bombs and gunshots in the night. To make matters worse, the island was having trouble with deserters from the foreign legion. And the Corsicans, who had a Mafia attitude toward life, namely, trust nobody but each other and let’s-settle-our-differences-among-ourselves-to-hell-with-outsiders, kept that outlook when they left the island and went to France.

Hard-asses, all of them. In France, most lived in Marseilles, over more than half a million out of a population of a million. They ran the city and they ran France’s dope trade, doing whatever was necessary to keep that business operating smoothly.

Corsican honor. A lot of people died because of it.

“You’re right,” said Bolt. “The more I think about it, the more I feel Remy’s going to make the first move, and he won’t care who gets hurt. From what I’ve learned about him, he’s not the calm, level-headed type.”

Edith, reaching for her third croissant, stopped. She didn’t like this. Remy Patek. She knew who he was, everybody in France knew who he was, and she was frightened at some of the stories she’d heard about him from Roger. A sick man, Remy. She didn’t want Roger mixed up with him, just because the American had something to take care of. No, she didn’t like it.

But there was nothing she could do about it, at least not here. Maybe when she and Roger were together tonight at home, just the two of them, she could talk to him and maybe push some sense into his head. John Bolt. So what if he spoke good French? That’s no reason for her husband to risk his life, was it?

Edith said, “I still don’t see why you just don’t tell the police you’re here. I’m sure they would help you, wouldn’t they, Roger?”

Christ, was she going to start that again? Roger shook his head from side to side in forced patience. “I’ve told you again and again,
chérie,
the police—not all of them, but some of them—the police are not to be trusted. Some work directly for the Corsicans, others do favors for them because they are forced to by certain politicians who owe the Corsicans. John would probably get nowhere, or if he did, it might be too late. Lonzu might be in hiding by the time John got the cooperation he needed.”

John also might get his ass shot off, thought Bolt, if the wrong people find out who I am and why I’m hanging around. Edith, Edith, you’re not being smart. You fell in love with the man and married him for what he is, and now you’re trying to make him over into something else. Don’t you know that if you succeed in changing him you’d have a different man, an unhappy man, a man who’d eventually want to step on your face because you stepped on his and cut his balls off at the same time?

You married a cop, baby, not an insurance salesman. Staying awake nights goes with the territory. Which is one reason I never married. My job’s a bitch, and I wake up loving it and hating it at the same time. But I can’t wake up worrying about how somebody else feels about it, because then I become that much weaker due to that particular worry. So I travel alone. It’s faster that .way, even if it does hurt sometimes.

Edith said nothing. She’d heard the argument before about corrupt cops. She didn’t believe it; well, not all of it But why argue? She shoved part of the croissant into her mouth, enjoying the light, perfectly done piece of pastry. Jean-Paul was a fantastic cook, even if he was a bachelor leading an immoral life with all those loose women.

“When do you see Cloris?” asked Jean-Paul.

Bolt looked at his watch. “Thought I’d surprise her, drop in early, like eleven o’clock. Say, that’s in twenty minutes. Damn, time sneaks away, doesn’t it? Hey, I forgot to ask. I see you’ve got a couple of new dogs. Puppies, too. Any new girls’ names?”

Bolt grinned. Jean-Paul named his dogs after his ex-girlfriends. Male or female dogs made no difference. The dog got a woman’s name, and some of the women involved didn’t like it.

Jean-Paul frowned, thinking, then smiled sadly. “That one over there, the collie. He is new. His name is Francine. She was a television newscaster,”

Edith frowned, twisting her mouth in moral indignation. She hadn’t known about
that
one. Franchie G. was one of the most famous women in France, beautiful, young, rich, and she could have any man she wanted. How did Jean-Paul ever …?”

“That one there, the dachshund, his name is Elke, and the small one with the brown and black spots, that’s Josephine. She’s a she.”

“Sooner or later it had to turn out that way,” said Bolt. Fucking Jean-Paul. A funny man. You know something, thought Bolt, that’s not a bad idea. Get yourself an animal and name it after a woman you used to know. Serves her right. Considering some of the women Bolt had been mixed up with in his life, he ought to go out and buy an armadillo, a platypus, and maybe a sabertooth tiger.

He stood up. “O.K. Off to see Cloris and learn if she’s the type Alain would come home to. If she is, she’s going to have company until the ship lands. Anything else from Le Havre?”

Roger took a quick sip of coffee, then placed the cup back on a saucer held in his left hand. “No. Same thing. We’ve got men ready to leave for the port the day before the ship lands. And we hear from our grapevine that both the Count and Remy, might have their own men there, each for his own reasons.”

“To be expected,” said Jean-Paul, his thick arms hanging down, a puppy’s tiny pink tongue flicking at his fingers. “There’s going to be more people on the coast when that ship comes in than landed on D day. I could go there, sell cigarettes and postcards to everybody, and retire.

“Make some more croissants before you go,” said Roger Dinard, reaching for the last one.

Ahmed counted his change, grinned, turned, and walked out of the liquor store. Gripping the bottle by its neck, the brown paper bag crushed tight around the champagne, he stood on the sidewalk looking up at the sky. He shivered a little under his gray suit jacket.

He couldn’t get used to this damn French weather. Chilly most of the time, except for August, when it got hot as hell and everybody left the city and went somewhere else.

Africa. Now, there was a warm place. Algeria. Yes, he missed it sometimes, and one of these days he was going back, with lots of money and a new car and maybe even a Frenchwoman sitting beside him.

That ought to impress them. Ignorant people in his village back in Algeria. Always criticizing him for wanting more, for wanting to be somebody. Telling him he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t amount to anything because he was Algerian in a French world and there was no place for him to fit in.

Well, they were wrong, because he’d found his place. Working for the Corsicans, for Remy Patek, and getting paid well. Beating people, killing them, maybe driving Remy around when he had to collect money. It paid well, and money was all that mattered in a tough world.

Ahmed, big, not too bright, twenty-eight years old, had found his place and was proud of himself. Like many Algerians, he found violence to be natural, and he never questioned many things others might have found upsetting or unnatural.

Like what he had done to the woman last night, Cloris. A nice name. First he had cut off her hair, then he had torn off her gown, and he had showed her—yes, by Allah, he had showed her. She never had a man do it to her like that before. Ahmed knew. Sure, she screamed and screamed, and she bled, but Ahmed had enjoyed it, enjoyed every damn minute of it.

That’s why he was going back. There was something inside of him, something strange, something that yielded him his greatest sexual excitement when he hurt a woman badly, the way he had hurt Cloris last night.

He stopped walking for a few seconds, the memory of his brutal sex with Cloris suddenly strong in his mind. That’s why he was going back this morning with the champagne. He wanted her again, wanted to fuck her again, to see her frightened face weeping and looking up at him, begging him, yes, begging him not to do it.

He felt good then, so damn good then that he just couldn’t explain it to anyone. They wouldn’t understand.

Paris was quiet now, just waking up. He walked past the open door of a small bakery and smelled the freshly baked long loaves of bread. He watched shopgirls come out front and unroll awnings to keep the sun out of windows, and he saw street cleaners, Algerians like himself and Africans, sweep the running water along gutters, using the old traditional brooms of thick brown straw tied to a stick.

That wasn’t for him, not for Ahmed. Sweeping streets. Shit work, work for Algerians and Africans who weren’t as lucky as he was.

To hell with them. Ahmed had money in his pocket, champagne in his hand, and he was going to see the woman Cloris. Cloris. He thought of her, licked his lips, feeling his cock grow stiff and strong in his pants, and he walked faster.