The Stiff Upper Lip (15 page)

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He said he couldn't. Said the word was out that ole Roscoe was bad news.”

“Who'd put out the word?”

“I don' know. Mr. Lee maybe.”

“Who's Mr. Lee?”

“I don' know. Some Dutch Chinaman. I used to hear him an' Odessa talkin' about Mr. Lee.”

“Was he Wallace's boss?”

“I don' know. Maybe.”

That made three I-don't-knows in a row, and two maybes.

“All right,” I said, “let's take it back to the Paris end. Do you know who was bankrolling Odessa in Paris?”

“What do you mean, bankrollin'?”

“Just what I said. Odessa couldn't have had that kind of money, at least not in the beginning.”

“He always carried a lot of cash.”

“Not that kind of cash.”

I was thinking of the figure Bobet had read out of his notebook. I was thinking of gang wars too, and the timing, and of something else Bobet had said:
The drug traffic in France isn't organized by any one person, Monsieur
.

“I don' know,” repeated Roscoe, pulling at his hair. “Like I said, I was jus' doin' him a favor.”

“So you said. But now, who else among the brothers was doing him favors?”

“Nobody, man. Leas' not at the start. It was too dangerous. Them that was in it Was already doin' it for Delatour.”

“You said not at the start. What about at the end?”

“I don' know, man. Odessa could put a lot of pressure on people.”

“So some of the brothers ended up working for him too?”

“A couple, yeah.”

“When did this happen?”

“I don' know exackly.”

“But it was recent?”

“Yeah, recent.”

I had, I thought, the makings of a fit.

“Was Atherton one of them?”

“Ath'ton? No, he was one of Delatour's.”

That fit too.

There was no way, however, that I could get him to name names, not then, although next morning, when one of the Paris papers ran photos of every black American playing pro ball in France, he did better. Right then, though, it didn't matter that Odessa had lied to him, or that Odessa was dead, or that the rest of the brothers had stood by during the police investigation and let the murder accusation stand against him. It was black solidarity. Either it was black solidarity or else Roscoe Hadley,
né
Jimmie Cleever, was much naïver than I could credit him with.

He bounced back at dinner. All it took was a good meal, a bottle of wine, and an audience. Nico provided all three, and Roscoe, you could say, sang for more than his supper. He was king and jester rolled into one, talking about America, about Europe, about Parisians and Parisiennes, and his life and times on and off the hardwood, and all with that weird comical sophistication that made you forget he was a ghetto spade still on the underside of thirty. Long before we got to the coffee and cognac, he had Nico roaring with laughter and, strange to say, me as well. Only Valérie didn't join in. I caught her staring at me more than once across the dinner table. I tried to read her thoughts, without success. It was only after dinner, when we resumed our council of war, that she found her tongue again.

As for me, I had a theory going, and if, the way it worked out, you could say I tripped over my
modus operandi
, right then, in the comfort of Nico's living room, it looked worth pursuing. Sooner or later, I figured, we were going to have a choice to make; first off, though, I wanted to talk to Mr. Lee, the “Dutch Chinaman” Roscoe had mentioned. Furthermore, I wanted to do it without Roscoe. He was our trump card, and, as far as we knew, Nico's was what the cloak-and-dagger boys call a “safe house.” Coming into Paris the night before. Valérie thought she might have been spotted. She'd ditched the car she'd rented and made the rendezvous with Billy Wheels on foot. But I was pretty sure we'd been clean all day, and in case we ran into trouble in Amsterdam, I wanted Roscoe out of it.

So far so good.

But then Valérie started to press me on what would happen after Mr. Lee.

“That depends,” I said. “Sooner or later, we'll have to make a choice. It may be Roscoe will have to end up talking to the Law after all.”

“Talkin' to what Law?” Roscoe said.

I summarized what Bobet and Frèrejean had said. I didn't like the idea of dealing with them any more than he did, but I thought there was at least a fair chance we could make the immunity stick.

Roscoe threw his head back and laughed.

“You must be out o' your mind, man. I'm not talkin' to no
Law!
”

“It could be either that or Delatour,” I said.

“I don' see why it's got to be one or the other.”

I started to answer, but Valérie cut me off.

“Then you'd better begin seeing it,” she said sharply.

“There's nothin' to see, honey. They already 'xonerated me of Odessa's killin'. If I jus' tiptoe away, they'll forget the res'.”

“Tiptoe away! You already ran from trouble once in your life! You swore you'd never do it again!”

“Who's talkin' about runnin'?” he said mildly. “I'm planning on stayin' right here awhile.”

His tone drove her out of her chair.

“You're
what
?”

“Tha's right. While you was gone today, I worked it out with Nico. Says he can always use an extra hand on the milk farm. Says they got all kinds o'
sportin
' clubs in the towns aroun' here, kids 'n' men both. I could even do a little coachin' by 'n' by, teachin' ball. Shoot, honey,” he said, chuckling, “I always did want to try my hand milkin'
cows
.…”

“For God's sake!” Valérie exploded at him. “They don't even milk cows by hand any more!”

“Well …” Roscoe began, but probably that was the last word he got in for a while.

“Cage!” Valérie said, holding him in her glare. “Leave us alone!”

I started to say something, but she cut me off too.

“Do what I say!” she said, whirling at me. “Please! Please leave us
alone!
”

Roscoe was staring at me, his big mouth ajar.

I went out then. I found Nico van den Luyken in his library, a small but well-proportioned room where another fire was blazing in the tiled hearth. We had one of those awkward conversations men sometimes get into. Clearly he wanted to talk about Valérie. I didn't. He seemed to assume we were both her ex-lovers, like privileged members of some exclusive club. Roscoe had beaten us out, it seemed, but that was all right with him. Anyway, Roscoe was really quite an extraordinary fellow, didn't I agree? Of course he was welcome to stay as long as he wanted to stay. Then Nico wanted to know if there was really nothing he could do. Valérie, he said, had told him very little, she hadn't wanted him to become involved more than necessary. That was well and good, but if Roscoe was really in trouble, and quite serious trouble apparently …”

“There's one thing,” I told him finally.

“What's that?”

“I don't think it will come to it, but if anything should happen to us, or any one of us, there's somebody you could call.”

I dug out Frèrejean's number in Paris and gave it to him. This seemed to please him no end.

When I went back in, the living room was quiet as a morgue. Roscoe had his head down and palmed between his big hands, like he was trying to shut out sound. Valérie was slumped in a chair, small-faced and tense. Clearly she hadn't gotten what she wanted, and from my own experience I could guess this came as quite a shock to her.

And that was that.

I spent the night under an eiderdown, in a guest room big enough for a platoon of lovers. I spent it alone, though.

As far as I know, we all did.

12

“Who's Looie the Luke?” I said.

“Leduc,” Valérie answered. “Jean-Louis Leduc.”

We were in the Beetle, heading north, alone. The rain had stopped during the night, but there was a stiff wind blowing off the North Sea and it was whipping clouds in bunches over the flat, water-streaked land. The Beetle was doing better in the wind than we were. Neither of us had mentioned the night before, but it was there, between us, and conversation had become a sometime thing.

The name—“Looie the Luke”—had come up at breakfast. It had been Roscoe's contribution. “Looie the Luke,” he'd said, “or Flooie the Fluke, something like that. Odessa mentioned him.”

In fact, he remembered, Odessa had gone looking for him once when they'd come back to Paris.

Jean-Louis Leduc. Bobby H., it seemed to me, had mentioned him too, and so did the papers we saw at breakfast. According to the papers, Leduc was the registered owner of the Place Clichy brasserie that had been shot up. But not one of the wounded, or dead.

That fit too.

“What do you know about him?” I asked Valérie in the Beetle.

“Not much. They call him Loulou in the underworld. He's old, an old-style
caïd
. He was in the Resistance, or so they say.”

“What's a
caïd
?”

“A boss. It's an Arab word.”

“The same as ‘big bonnet'?”

“In a way.”

“Is Delatour one too?”

“No. There's a difference.”

“He'd like to be, though, wouldn't he?”

“Yes.”

“And Leduc would be somebody he'd have to muscle out of his way?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know he was dealing in dope too? Leduc, I mean?”

“No.”

It stood to reason, though.
The drug traffic in France isn't organized by any one person
, and Dédé Delatour had come up with a pretty clever scheme to push his way in. Only Leduc had subverted part of the scheme, by bank-rolling Odessa Grimes himself. So Delatour had had to punish Leduc, by way of Odessa's murder, and Leduc had retaliated, I figured, by giving Atherton to the Law. (“We have our sources of information,” Bobet had said.) Whereupon Delatour had upped the ante drastically, as befit a
caïd
-on-the-make, and now there was Leduc blood splattered all over the streets of Paris.

So far, it appeared, all the escalation had been on Delatour's part. But unless I missed my guess, or the Law stepped in first to stop it, the next move was up to Loulou Leduc.

I've referred to my
modus operandi
. What I had in mind, broadly speaking, was the gathering and suppression of information, a technique I used to be pretty good at in my California days. The way it looked to me on the rainy road to Amsterdam, Roscoe had two things going for him: one was his body; the other was what he knew, or could be made to appear to know. I was hopeful of using the second to save the first. In the meantime, though, until such time as we could make a deal, it seemed like a good idea to keep the body at Nico van den Luyken's.

Roscoe thought so too.

Valérie may have thought otherwise, but it was hard to know what she thought that morning, other than that she was down on the male sex in general. Not that you'd have known it to look at her. She was wearing a skirt-and-sweater combination in a dusty-rose jersey wool, with a long tunic to match, dark leather boots, and white trench-coat, and her hair glistened blond in the gray air. I thought again about Nico's resources and complimented her on the fit of her clothes.

“They ought to fit,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“They're mine,” she said, her jaw jutting firmly forward.

The drawer opened, the drawer closed.

End of conversation.

We came into Amsterdam off the Hague-Rotterdam autoroute and wound our way across the canals into that old and seedy part of town around the Zeedijk which is fobbed off to the tourists as the Sailors' Quarter. It's pretty colorful of a summer night, when the red-lit whores display their offerings in ground-floor windows, and maybe you could even find a bona-fide seaman among the nocturnal flotsam of tourists and international youth, but on a gray morning in late fall, with the rain falling again in wind-driven gusts and the cobbles awash in sodden debris, well, you'd settle for Wallace Edner too.

Wallace Edner had the build and the stoop of Roscoe, but his playing days were already over. Lines as deep as gullies surrounded his mouth, and the blood that speckled his eyeballs looked like it had come to stay. We found him in the same saloon where Roscoe and Valérie had tracked him down. It was a mock-Western joint where the dust gathered like tumbleweed under the bar rail and the daylight had to fight its way in. At the back end of the bar, Wallace Edner was just emptying a shot of whiskey into his mid-morning schooner of beer.

“Good morning, Wallace,” I said.

He looked at me, gloomy and red-eyed, then at Valérie. If he recognized her right off, though, he didn't show it.

“We want to see Mr. Lee,” I said.

“Mr. Lee?” he said. “Now, which Mr. Lee would that be?”

He took an experimental sip from the glass mug. He swallowed, grimacing a little, then, when that stayed down, helped himself to a larger slug.

“I didn't know there was more than one,” I said.

“There's lots of Mr. Lees,” he answered.

I took out a hundred-florin note, worth about forty U.S. dollars, and laid it on the bar. I ordered another round for Wallace Edner, and beers for Valérie and me. The beer was better than passable, but Wallace Edner pushed his aside and simply added the second shot of whiskey to the schooner in front of him.

“That narrows it down some,” he said, grinning. His mouth had a lot of metal in it, with gaps between. “What you say your name was?”

“I didn't,” I said. “I don't know that it would mean anything to Mr. Lee. Just tell him I'm a friend of Loulou's.”

“Loulou's?”

“Leduc,” I said. “Monsieur Leduc, from Paris.”